Not all of the best Android phones and tablets work equally, and some have aggressive battery-saving software that can reliably suppress background notifications. The Android team at Google I/O explained this week why it’s an ongoing issue.
Modern versions of Android strike a good balance between extending battery life (by pausing or limiting background tasks) and remaining connected to the cloud servers that provide push notifications. However, some manufacturers go a step further for their devices, by implementing more battery saving techniques that can lead to background services breaking. OnePlus has had problems for years with unreliable notifications, as well as Chinese versions of many Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo phones.
Several of Google’s Android teams held a Q&A at Google I/O this week, where an app developer asked what they could do in their apps to solve efficient battery life management issues. results on some devices. Dianne Hackborn, a longtime software engineer for Android, replies: “We’ve found this to be an increasingly painful thing for app developers.”
“Android is not like Google’s operating system,” says Hackborn, “OEM […] does a lot of customization and innovation on the platform, so there are a lot of things we can’t just tell them or force them to do. And in this area, this is where OEMs really care about their users, in terms of battery life. So this is an area where they put a lot of effort into improving things… sometimes improving things – for developers – a little bit. also much.”
Android’s core operating system is open source, so device manufacturers could theoretically customize it to their own liking. However, if companies want to include the Google Play Store and other must-have apps, they must license Google Mobile Services on Android. GMS agreements are Google’s way of ensuring that Android devices with the Play Store are fully functional generally same. Google has also used GMS to force manufacturers to adopt certain features, like Material You-style design on more phones, and hide custom navigation options during setup.
It seems that, at least for now, Google is letting the manufacturer optimize the battery. Hackborn pointed to a number of changes in Android over the years, such as Doze and App Standby (both introduced in Android 6.0 Marshmallow in 2015), as examples of how the Android team has listened to the relationship. manufacturers’ focus on battery life. “We’d better do it within the platform as a whole,” she said, “rather than letting the OEMs each do things separately. And OEMs are still doing a lot of things, we are constantly talking to our OEMs and working to reduce the changes they make.”
If you are having trouble with error messages on your Android device, go to system settings and disable battery optimization for a certain app frequent perform the trick. Buying another phone from a manufacturer like Google or Samsung is also an option.
