- Did you know your mobile device can survive on a single charge for 3 days? Almost any Android phone can easily give you that by following simple optimized battery charging tips.
- Are you wondering why Android push notifications not working for you or your friends?
- Did you notice messages miraculously arriving altogether once plugging the device into a charger or connecting to a home WiFi network?
In case one of your answers is yes, then you have come to a right place.
Let’s start from a short technical intro.
What is a mobile application?
We don’t have a nice drawing cause our designer left the job in the middle of the Corona pandemic but we are going to use our imagination. Stay with us and you are going to learn a lot.
In the meantime, please enjoy a video of a perfect smartphone that did not really have mobile apps back then.
A mobile app is obviously a program that developers create. It is written in Java or Kotlin (completely unnecessary technical facts that look cool and impressive). The application collects data from a mobile device (files, pictures, GPS sensors), displays it in a nice interface (lists, buttons, and pictures), and monitors screen touches you perform to operate the device).
What would be the simplest examples of such apps?
- Calculators
- Flashlight
- Notes
- Tasks and reminders
- Time trackers and alarms
All these are very simple apps that can be created in a week, get approved by Google Play Store very quickly, and usually don’t need any permission to run. Oh, and they don’t care about the Internet. That’s why all calculators work in the subway and flashlights don’t stop functioning while hiking outside under bad cellular coverage.
Beware! In case such a thing asks for Bluetooth, your phone number, contacts access, SMS confirmation, social login, or another “very necessary resource it cannot live without” – remove it immediately! Most likely it is a nice cover for a much more complicated fishing or malware code.
Tools don’t need internet access the same way Leatherman does not need Bluetooth to help you fixing electricity.
As soon as the app you use does something that needs to be preserved in time or throughout multiple devices – here’s where the mysterious “server-side” or “remote assistance” comes into play.
- A note-keeping application needs to backup the thought you’ve trusted it to keep. Everything has to be synced to а remote server so the next time you buy a new device, move to iPhone (God forbid) or open your laptop, the information is pulled and you can continue where you stopped.
- A currency converting app and market data updates – all have to be brought from financial subscription feeds the developer has.
- Chat and alerts services sync information with the server to make sure messages are delivered. This is why HezdApp Family Tracking App needs the Internet, for example.
What additional Android application components are required to deliver you the best experience possible?
Social logins
Facebook, Google, Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, and the rest – all have social login services. Why is it needed? It is a simple win-win situation. The companies make sure you are a real person behind the social account and the developers receive information about you without ever seeing your password.
How come? It’s because once a social login button is pressed, the work is passed to the social platform and the rest is done in an isolated box the application and the developer has no access to. At the end of the process, the app receives an OK of FAILURE response which is used to decide if everything is fine. Facebook and Google are caring out all the data, not the application.
In case everything is fine, the developer is allowed to ask for your name, email, contacts, avatar, and so on.
Don’t act irresponsibly!
Every social login process gives you the information developer asks for to be approved. Read it and make your decision by confirming or denying, and do not blame anybody later!
The permission can be revoked if you feel paranoid. Just Google it and learn how it’s done in the social network of your choice.
Statistics
That’s correct. No business can live without it. Well, at least businesses that want to improve your experience and guide you towards business goals.
A shopping app needs to know you add products to the shopping cart and complete purchase. So the app implements statistics (analytics, business intelligence – all synonyms you can hear) and starts aggregating steps users perform. They don’t need to know anything about you, because obviously, they do already received everything they asked for. The application just needs to understand your behaviour inside the applications. The company cares you can easily locate the “add to cart” button, you are not scared by selecting a payment method and once purchase confirmation is displayed, you continue shopping and don’t close the app.
The statistics are usually collected through an external service. The services are easy to use, very secure, work fast and have flexible pricing models, including free packages. Firebase from Google, MixPanel, AppsFlyer – are examples of such respected services.
The developer places events throughout the application, similar to police investigation records – “user opened the app”, “user viewed a product”, “user closed the app and left watching Netflix”. The events are sent to the selected service, aggregated, and presented in a nice form to the developer to review the users’ behavior. It is then analyzed and decided whether the app is converting well or the screens have to be redesigned.
Push notifications
While statistics sends information to the outside world, the notifications are arriving to your device.
Anything that the business finds valuable to their users can be delivered in a form of a notification.
- Sales and discounts
- New points or coins granted
- New likes and comments
- Invites and updates
- Notifications, messages and requests
All these is delivered through push messages.
HedzApp, for example, pushes you that a person received your message and then viewed it and then responded to it.
Why is it called “push”?
It’s because messages a pushed to your device from a remote server that belongs to the company.
The mechanism is tightly connected to the operating system (Android or iOS) and works very similarly to SMS messages. SMS “remembers” your phone number. Somebody sends you something through SMS and the messages wait on the cellular company servers until you become available (connected). As you get connected to the network, everything gets delivered.
Change sim card to another number and you become “invisible” to all the existing messages, political advertisement and financial institutions.
Reinstall the application you have (remove and download from the store again) and you become a new person, new conversion for the developer, а completely new client. It happens because the notifications get pushed to you by your mobile device ID and the app installation ID. If one of them changes – the server cannot find you. All the messages will sit and wait for you to appear.
Change your device and you are lost. Reinstall the app and you disappear. Well, until you approve the social connect again. As soon as you do it, the server connects old and new IDs together and starts pushing information to all devices in your possession. That’s why all of your phones, tablets, and computers receive notifications simultaneously – by your identity.
So, enough with the conspiracy!
Let’s talk about the main reason we are here for and this is the list of the problems we have displayed at the very beginning.
The main reason for all the problems we have listed at the beginning is the optimized battery charging
Everyone wants to increase the battery life of their phones. While you can manually optimize battery usage by removing all the apps and keeping the device for the bare communication needs, this is not why we purchase them after all.
That’s why Google created its own, internal battery optimizer for Android, called Doze, as part of the operating system. While this feature is beneficial most of the time, it can also interfere with functionality in some apps. It can also be modified and managed differently but all the big companies that lease and preinstall the system to their devices – Huawei, Samsung, Xiaomi, and so on. Have you noticed different devices have different settings? That’s because all Androids are customized.
Below are some battery charging tips for Android devices. In other words – battery discharging.
What is battery optimization?
In case you’re not familiar, battery optimization is a function built into Android. It preserves battery life by limiting what apps can do in the background.
Apps use what’s called a wakelock to keep your device alive even while you’re not actively using it. By default, Android wants to go into a “deep sleep” when your screen is off, but this can pose a problem for some apps. For instance, you don’t want Spotify music to stop playing just because your phone’s screen is off. Thus, app developers use wakelocks to keep their services alive when needed.
While wakelocks are important, developers can abuse them. This is why Facebook and many other apps kill your Android battery in the background. Doze helps to fix this issue by providing limited “maintenance windows” that allow apps to check in every once in a while, instead of constantly. The longer your phone is dormant, the more time passes between these windows.
In many cases, this is a great feature. But for apps that rely on steady connections (stats, updates, and, of course, push notifications, it can create an issue. Thankfully, we are allowed to control it.
How to turn off Android battery optimization
To disable battery optimization for any Android app, perform the following steps:
- First, visit Settings > Apps & notifications.
- Tap see all apps at the bottom of the recently opened apps list to see everything on your phone. Choose the app you want to make the adjustment for. Alternatively – search for battery optimization using the setings search function.
- Expand the advanced section on the app info page. Select Battery and you’ll open another menu with several battery settings.
- Tap the battery optimization entry and you’ll see a list of apps again. On the bar at the top of the screen, tap Not optimized and change it to All apps so you can see everything. Once again, select the app that you want to change.
You’ll see a new window; select Don’t optimize here to turn off battery optimization for that app.
This will prevent Doze from restricting the app’s background usage. If the app still behaves strangely after you do this, you may also consider turning off Adaptive Battery under Settings > Battery. This is a separate but similar feature Android uses to optimize battery usage.
Over time, it learns what apps you don’t use often, and limits battery usage for those apps. However, you shouldn’t need to disable this in most cases.
What apps should you disable Android battery optimization for?
What types of apps run into problems with Doze? The following are some you might consider checking:
- Messaging apps like HedzApp, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber. Battery optimization can cause push notifications to arrive late.
- Photo backup apps. You may want to consider disabling battery optimization for apps like Google Photos that automatically back up your photos to the cloud. Often, you’ll open it and see that the app hasn’t backed up pictures in days. This could lead to you losing photos if something happened to your device in the meantime.
- Delivery notifications from Amazon and AliExpress might get delayed.
Remember that you should disable battery optimization responsively. Removing the system control from any app you have can result in buttery draining in a matter of hours.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us and ask questions about HedzApp functioning or Android in general. We’d love to help.
