With the last version of the Android P Developer Preview released, we’re quickly heading toward the final build of another major Android version. And for Android P – aka version 9.0 – battery life is a major focus. The Adaptive Battery feature will dole out background access to only the apps you use, a new auto brightness scheme has been devised, and the Android team has made changes to how background work runs on the CPU. All together, battery life should be batter (err, better) than ever.
To get a bit more detail about how all this works, we sat down with a pair of Android engineers: Benjamin Poiesz, group product manager for the Android Framework, and Tim Murray, a senior staff software engineer for Android. And over the course of our second fireside Android chat, we learned a bit more about Android P overall and some specific things about how Google goes about diagnosing and tracking battery life across the range of the OS’ install base.
I like these technical interviews with Android developers. They provide great insight into the current goings-on of the operating system.
Hey man, if you want to continue our earlier conversation, please hit me up. andersenep at gmail. email/skype/phone/whatever. I can’t reply in the comments section because the post is now too old or something.
@Thom and everyone else: sorry, but I have no other way to contact this guy via OSAlert or anything else.
Edited 2018-08-02 03:11 UTC
I thought this whole battery saving was a thing back in Lollipop?
It was released in Marshmallow. The basic idea was that if you put the phone down & didn’t touch it, then it shut a ton of things off.
Then Nougat, if memory serves, refined it so that if the device was say, in your pocket, it wouldn’t turn off quite as much, but still save a lot of life.
So, I take this new development as a further refinement using better CPU affinity and such.
Edited 2018-08-02 17:27 UTC
Yeah, it was a major and prominent part of Lollipop — the Lol part, in fact.
Yeah, any serious talk of battery saving in Android has to be a joke by now.