Android 5.0 battery life: what's new, and what it can do for you

The most useful thing about Android 5.0 Lollipop isn’t the new look: it’s the improvements that mean your device’s battery will last a lot longer. Here’s why Lollipop will last for ages.

Android 5.0 Lollipop delivers real improvements in battery life. / © ANDROIDPIT

Mobile technology is getting faster, cheaper and more impressive every year - the tech in a Google Wear smartwatch would have seemed amazing in a full-sized smartphone just a few years ago - but the Achilles' heel of any mobile device remains the battery. It’s not that battery tech isn’t improving; it’s that our ever-growing list of demands (faster broadband, bigger screens, MOAR PIXELS and so on) cancel out those improvements.

That’s why most smartphones still need to be charged every day, why smartwatches are lucky to last until it gets dark and why tablets are essentially enormous battery packs with touch screens glued to the front of them.

Wouldn’t it be great if upgrading your operating system gave you a better battery too? That’s exactly what Android 5.0 Lollipop promises. It turns out that Android’s codenames are pretty accurate: where you can lick all the chocolate off a KitKat in no time at all, Lollipops can be licked for an awful lot longer.

Power to the people: Android 5.0 Project Volta

Project Volta set out to make Android much less power hungry. / © AndroidPIT

The most significant change in Android 5.0 is Project Volta, the successor to Project Butter (which was designed to make Android’s interface run more smoothly) and to Project Svelte (which was designed to make Android work with less RAM). This time the focus is on battery life, and there are several key changes that should make your device less demanding.

One of the things Google discovered about Android was that just waking a device from sleep for a single second burned through two whole minutes of standby time. That’s because waking didn’t just turn the screen on: the processor wakes up too, and the radio goes on to check for incoming data. Project Volta created a new “JobScheduler” API that’s designed to reduce that by scheduling housekeeping and low-priority tasks more efficiently.

ART for ART’s sake

In tests, the Android 5.0 L preview delivered 36% more battery life than KitKat. / © Google, ANDROIDPIT

The second important part is ART, the new runtime for Android apps. ART is faster and more efficient than the Dalvik runtime it replaces, and of course that means the device doesn’t have to work as hard - which in turn means it requires less power.

The excellent Ars Technica website decided to test Google’s claims with the Android L Developer Preview, and they found that for once, a tech firm wasn’t telling big fibs. With Battery Saver disabled - more about that in a moment - and Android L running on a well-used Nexus 5, battery life was up by a very impressive 36%. That’s a whole two hours more battery life.

The reason Ars didn’t enable Android L’s Battery Saver was because it has an effect on overall performance. When you enable it and your battery reaches 15% (or if you prefer, 5%), Battery Saver essentially applies the brakes to your device to eke out more battery life: it dims the screen, limits vibration and disables most background data so that apps don’t automatically update. Google reckons that on average, upgrading to Android 5.0 Lollipop and leaving Battery Saver on (it’s enabled by default) should give you an hour and a half of extra battery power.

Android 5.0’s big bad battery bug

Android's battery bug was bad enough to delay the launch on Nexus devices. / © Google

Given the many improvements to Android 5.0’s battery life, it’s a shame that the launch was almost immediately overshadowed by reports of a big battery bug: with Wi-Fi enabled on a Nexus 5, the bug would start sucking battery power like a thing that sucks things very hard. The good news is that the bug was reported as fixed on 6 November.

Doing it for the devs

One of the most important battery bits of Android 5.0 L is the one you won’t see unless you’re a developer: it’s called Battery Historian, and it gives app developers detailed information on how their apps will affect particular devices’ battery life. The hope is that instead of ignoring that information, developers will then ensure that their apps aren’t unnecessary power hogs. *cough* Facebook! *cough*

Other ways to boost battery life in Android 5.0 Lollipop

Messaging apps can be particularly heavy on battery life. / © ANDROIDPIT

Android itself can only do so much: the biggest effect on battery life is of course the apps you use and how often you use them. Facebook isn’t the only battery botherer, although it tops the list of battery-draining Android apps put together by security firm AVG: manufacturers’ own apps tend to be battery hogs, as are social networking apps and games. AVG would quite like to sell you an app to help solve that problem, although of course you can address it yourself by being really selective with the apps you install (or keep, in the case of pre-installed ones) and what you let them do.

What do you think? If you’ve upgraded to Lollipop, has it delivered on its power promises?

 

Source fromhttp://www.androidpit.com