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What Practices can App Developers follow for Battery Optimized Mobile Applications?

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Ethan Smith
What Practices can App Developers follow for Battery Optimized Mobile Applications?

Oppo, Apple, Vivo, Xiaomi Mi, Realme, and OnePlus are ranked as the top five brands with the best battery life for their mobile devices. But how long your mobile battery will last also depends on your usage duration and the type of apps you are using. Mobile app developers in India are busy creating new apps every day, while mobile users spend around 6.5 hours a day browsing through their devices.90% of the total internet time spent is through mobile apps. Facebook is leading the trend followed closely by Instagram and Snapchat. And needless to say, very high-resolution media is shared via them which drains the battery very quickly. It is actually possible to optimize mobile apps for better battery life. In this blog post, we will discuss few basics a mobile app developer can follow while engineering an app that will put less burden on the mobile battery.

Why optimize Mobile Apps?

Mobile app developers may overlook this aspect completely due to an absence of background in embedded systems. A high-power-consuming application leaves a wrong impression on the users. This happened initially with Facebook when it launched its standalone app in 2011. The app versions of Facebook and Instagram served high-quality data but in return burned out the battery within a couple of hours. This lead to many uninstalls. This was quickly rectified by optimizing the existing app and also introducing something called “Facebook lite”. 

As a result, the mobile app developers must design an app that drains less power in order to prevent negative reviews and establish a positive reputation among customers.

Optimizing Mobile Apps for a Better Battery Life

As much as mobile hardware companies are innovating to extend battery life and using it as a unique selling point, mobile app developers can use it as one attractive feature too. Let’s get down to business and discuss few essential elements that a mobile app developer can be mindful of during the development phase. These aspects are as follows:

  1. Strive to make the App Lazy

Apps that are designed for heavy data sharing or streaming are the biggest culprit for a poor-performing mobile battery. These apps can be made more respectful of battery life by following the principle of “Lazy First”. Finding an answer to these three vital questions  during the app development phase will lead the way to reduce or optimize battery-intensive operations in the app:

  • Defer: Is it possible to delay any action which is not required instantly? For example, the app can be programmed to wait till the device is plugged in before taking the backup of the data on the cloud. 
  • Reduce: Does the mobile app have any feature that is redundant and can be cut out? Like if the app has the capacity to cache the downloaded data then avoid waking up the radio for re-downloads.
  • Coalesce: Can some of the tasks be batched up with other apps to use the resources during the wake window of the device? For instance, collaborate with several apps to send messages together on the radio, rather than switching on the radio individually.

Indian app developers can design apps to use the radio, CPU, and screen judiciously which in turn will cut short the battery consumption by a lot.

2. Take Advantage of the Platform Features

Carefully choose the platform for app development while fabricating feature extensive apps that deal with high-resolution data. Some platforms are equipped with internal mechanisms to help conserve battery life. Although these mechanisms vary as per the OS, still all mobile app developers should be aware of them so that their app can leverage them successfully:

  1. Doze and App Standby: Put the idle app into standby mode with no internet access.
  2. App Standby Buckets: Based on the usage patterns, app mechanisms allow the system to put apps on limited resources like the CPU or screen.
  3. Background restrictions: If an app is found misusing the access, the system is designed to cue the user to regulate access to system resources. 
  4. Power management restrictions: Few platforms allow the mechanism to put the system on power saver mode or turn on night vision if the usage exceeds the set limit. 
  1. Make Use of Better Tools

Many platforms offer battery optimization tools that scan the app and track down the part(s) of your app that are excessive power spenders. Once you have locked in on the problematic area, work on applying the Lazy First principle strictly to the targeted areas. Indian mobile app developers can explore through Profile GPU Rendering and Battery Historian, two tools offered by Android.

Optimizing the Mobile App Before or After the Launch

Mobile application development companies look for mobile app developers that can produce feature-rich but optimized apps. Optimization is possible both before and after the app launch. It is always preferable to optimize the app before launch. It uses lesser RAM to install and start and shut down the speed will be fast.

When app optimization is done after the launch, it is not as effective in battery and RAM saving. The app will still be utilizing initially allocated RAM and additionally using the processor continuously for optimizing. It sort of nullifies the effect of optimization on battery usage. Indian app developers can follow the three methods discussed above to give the best optimization.

Conclusion:

When a user installs an Android app, it has an extension .apk but if you explore more you will find some files with extension .odex too. These are optimization files. They operate at the preloading phase of the application. Files of this particular extension help to speed up the process of optimization and faster loading of the app.

The best mobile app developer is the one who makes the best of the existing technology to create an interactive, engaging, and awe-inspiring app while keeping the backend compilation easy and fast without compromising on performance. 

We at RV Technologies, strive to deliver highly optimized and robust mobile apps. So if you are thinking about developing a mobile app or want to revamp an existing app, get in touch with our expert team to get a free quote.

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