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Purdue 'HUSH' Tool Promises 16% Battery Life Gain For Wasteful Android Phones
MojoKid writes: Researchers from Purdue University have developed a software tool for Android smartphones that purportedly slows down battery drain when handsets enter a sleep state. With the software tool installed, the researchers claim that smartphone battery life can be extended by nearly 16 percent. Called "HUSH," the software solution was developed in response to what the researchers say is the first large-scale study of smartphone energy drain occurring from everyday use by consumers. According to their research, apps drain 28.9 percent of battery power while the screen is turned off. HUSH dynamically identifies app background activities that it deems aren't useful to the user experience on a per-app basis and suppresses those apps when the screen is turned off.
This seems very similar to the Doze feature that is coming in Android M.
A latent existence
... you know, not have a million apps and processes running in the background at all times. There are already plenty of apps out there that let the user control this. Nothing to see here, folks.
Greenify has been around for a couple of years and does this wonderfully:
http://www.howtogeek.com/19813...
E
Play is the obvious way to download it to a random Android...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You wouldn't install this on a business phone. The app seems geared towards the general consumer who is not happy with the batteries available in most devices. There is so much preinstalled and unused bloatware on many smartphones that run in the background. Most users never even use the preinstalled apps but they still sit in memory and call home with barely any options to keep them quiet.
"Look what we did!" Headline when tons of others have done it before without feeling the need to issue a press release about it.
If a specific app has some function that is important to you, make sure it's unchecked on tbe settings page. That UI has implemented here:
https://github.com/hushnymous/...
Look, it's nice to know that there are cool features coming Real Soon for your phone if you've got a Google-Brand Nexus Device, just like Apple users can know there'll be something cool coming out for their Apple Brand iDevice, but if you're one of the billion or so Android users out there with some other phone or tablet (such as, just to pick entirely random examples, a Samsung or HTC or nearly-noname Coby), what you know is that your hardware vendor will probably never bother to put out more than a couple of point-release upgrades for your device, and even if they do, your phone company probably won't get around to shipping it, if your device is connected to a phone company and not WiFi-only.
(Ok, my Samsung 4mini got upgraded from 4.2ish to 4.4.2, but it's unlikely to get 5.x, my HTC never did get the upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2 distributed to it, and I don't remember if the Coby tablet started with 4.0.1 or the 4.0.4 it has now, but Coby seems to have forgotten they ever even made that tablet. In theory I appreciate the openness in Android, but basically what that means is that you have to decide for yourself when your vendor's abandoned you and it's time to root the device and install Cyanogen.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Have gnu, will travel.
Battery doctor already does this, I've had it on my phone for a year or two, it simply terminates one or two dozen apps that somehow run themselves for no good reason - has a whitelist too.
Androids flaw is allows apps more control than it allows users.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
All kinds of people love to steal your phone data.. but who watches the watchers?
Maybe it's this app.
Yes, and this will break everyone's shitty push notification apps like Facebook and OKCupid so they won't use it.
Disabling Facebook extends battery life by about 75%.
Turn off your phone when you're not expecting a call.
One of the reasons I have a phone in the first place is so I can be reached in case of emergencies or other unexpected events.
Are you sure it stops phone tracking? There are all sorts of passive things going on when your phone isn't 'on'. Wasn't this one of those things that you have to remove the battery to properly stop?
(Honest question—I seem to recall from a while ago that a surprising number of passive things go on while the phone is off. The OS may not be running, but it's not the only thing tracking you.)
So don't install it. How hard is that to figure out?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Mine, for example. My Sony Xperia Z2 shipped with KitKat, got updated to Lollipop, and will be getting Marshmallow as well. That's not "a couple of point-release upgrades", that's at least two major upgrades (and this on a phone which is now 18 months old.)
And the original Xperia Z started on Jelly Bean and got KitKat *and* Lollipop, so two major releases seems to be par for the course. (In total, the Z got the 4.1.2 it shipped with, then 4.2.2, 4.3, 4.4.2, 4.4.4 and 5.0.2, and I believe it will also be getting 5.1.1. That's six updates, two of them major.) And I've seen similar from my many other Android devices over the years, around half of which weren't even flagship products.
Oh, and you know how many carrier updates I've gotten? None. On my devices which are not Wi-Fi only, I have gotten every update straight from the manufacturer. You know why? Because I had the common-sense to buy unlocked phones, not buy them from the carrier in the false hope of somehow getting free hardware (while actually paying over the odds for it). If you're stupid enough to buy phones from your carrier and pay far more over the life of your contract than just buying unlocked, then frankly you deserve what you get.
Yes, fragmentation is a problem for Android. No, it is not only Google Nexus devices that get major updates, your misleading title to the contrary. Every non-Nexus device I've owned from flagship phones to entry-level kids tablets has gotten at *least* one major update, and several have gotten at least two.
And that's direct from the manufacturer. Unlike Apple fans, I can count on third-parties ensuring that even my oldest devices still get updates. My oldest devices are an Asus Transformer TF101 (early 2011) and Samsung Galaxy Ace (also early 2011). The Transformer has been brought all the way up to fro Honeycomb to Lollipop by third parties, and even the Galaxy Ace has been brought up from Froyo to KitKat.
That's four major releases so far for the tablet, and five in total for the phone. How many iOS devices have gotten five major updates?
Yes, Google needs to get operating system updates in check and take it away from the manufacturers and carriers' responsibility, but the situation is nowhere near as dire as you make it out to be.
"Researchers from Purdue University have developed a software tool for Android smartphones that .. dynamically identifies app background activities .. and suppresses those apps when the screen is turned off."
And you need university researchers to figure out that?
Or the system is working properly. 80% of people are happy with their thin phones and 20% of people can add battery cases if their needs call for it (numbers pulled out of ass based on seeing people with huge cases that might be battery cases).
Why do the rest of us need to carry around a 4 pound brick when our current thin phone gets us through the day?
Use an iPhone. This is the whole reason why Apple disallowed multitasking in the first place (relying instead on external notifications)... then they brought out API's to allow apps to do very specific things in the background (finish a download, play music, etc.). For a long time Apps had huge restrictions on what they could do in the background so that they didn't soak up battery.
Only recently were iPhone Apps allowed "free reign" in the background through a mechanism called "Background App Refresh". And you know what? The ability to do that is directly selectable _per app_ right in the Settings for the phone. No extra "Battery Saver" app needed.
It's funny how many techy people react to this type of thing as Apple being overly restrictive... when in reality the majority of users are appreciative of these restrictions as it gives them an overall better experience.
Recently, we were on a cruise. Since we were going to be in international areas and didn't want to come home to a huge phone bill, we switched our phones to airplane mode (data off). We kept our phones on because they could be used to take photos or play games during the trip. I noticed that our battery life was greatly extended when the phone didn't need to maintain a 4G connection at all times. It led me to wonder if someone could make an app that would turn off the 4G connection when the phone isn't being actively used.
Of course, this might result in data-checking apps (e.g. your e-mail app) not getting notifications that an e-mail has arrived. So perhaps it could turn on the data for 5 minutes every hour to allow background apps to pull data. I wonder just how much battery life an app like this would save.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The battery on my Nexus 5 began malfunctioning just shy of a year old. When new it would last me the entire workday with about 20% remaining by 10pm. But now it would drain normally to about 40% (about 2-3 pm in my workday), then drop to 0% in the next 45 minutes. I tried all sorts of battery reset and calibration apps, and various discharge/charge to full tricks to try to fix it. Finally I called Google. To make sure the problem wasn't being caused by an app, they asked me to boot the phone into safe mode and do another battery rundown test. In safe mode, only the apps which were originally installed on the phone are allowed to run.
Holy crap! Even with the bad battery it lasted 2 days 20 hours before dying.
If the apps needlessly drain battery then fix the apps. This is what Free software is about. That the apps are not Free? So you have opened the can of worms, try to catch them all.
..you could just turn auto sync off, unless you really need it. Auto sync should realistically only be on when charging. If I want to see new tweets or mail, I will just swipe down on the app manually for sync.
"I seem to recall from a while ago that a surprising number of passive things go on while the phone is off. The OS may not be running, but it's not the only thing tracking you."
Back when the Snowden thing started, he mentioned things like that, which was then vehemently denied by the manufacturers. They saw no way how the radio could be powered with the phone switched off. Of course, he was in a good position to be paranoid about phones with the firmware modified by TLAs.
There are phones that can wake up from power off to sound an alarm. Presumably, they boot some lightweight OS image that's just enough to play the alarm audio and display a snooze button. A phone like that could be modified to wake up with the screen off and the radios on (and remember the unlock code for the SIM). But that doesn't mean that phones work like that out of the box. There would be trouble with the FCC and FAA if phones did that during air travel, not to mention unexpected data roaming fees.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
You're better off installing Facebook and just putting a bookmark to the web page on your launcher.
You fully missed the point of the OPs question: when it makes its decision, what's the chance it will "put to sleep" something that actually is usefull ?
In short: If you have any apps on your phone you think must run you cannot install that "Hush" app on it, or you must accept the possibility that those get put to sleep because of a "false positive".
Having said that, I assume that that dynamically-identifying-and-put-to-sleep is only one modeus operandi, with it having another one which will only identify the apps, and leave it upto the user to choose which ones to actually put to sleep.
This single step has increased my wife's, my daugher's, and my workplace secretary's phone lives by a day for all of them. Facebook transmits a *ridiculous* amount of image data and other wifi or cellphone data plan traffic, and turning it off also cut their phone bills quite a lot because they stopped going *over* the very generous data plan limits they had bought. I flipped out when we looked at their phone bills and I saw roughly 300 MByte every hour on the hour of accumulated Facebook data. Leave it on all day, and it blow through 3 Gig a day easily. Make it a month, and spend significant amounts of time dinking on Facebook away from a reliable wifi access point, and you can go through a month's data plan in a couple of days, and go through a battery in la few hours.
Then I found out they were using the big battery packs I'd bought them *as a default device to around with their phones plugged in* rather than leaving that on the charger in the house, or on their desk, so *of course* that was always drained, too.
This is exactly why Apple waited so long for multi tasking in IOS. It is because all app makers deem their app is critical to the usefulness of the phone and thus every fart app, needs root access, a copy of all communications, full phone access, and a copy of your medical and credit score.
The simple fact is security permissions in android have been very broad. yes newer versions are starting to clamp down, but you still can't deny access to an app during install. it is either accept or deny the entire thing.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You're better off installing Facebook and just putting a bookmark to the web page on your launcher.
+1 For you sir! https://m.facebook.com/ is far superior to the shitey app. You can post pictures, message, and read all the wedding announcements and funny baby pictures without FailBook stealing your contact list, monitoring your location and generally being a douche. And to really put a cherry on top: it stops running when you're not using it! If you live and die by your FB messenger, this won't work for you, but if you actually want your phone to be a phone with some juice in the battery, this is the way forward!
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Maybe that is true for you, but i'm more egoistic about my phone.
The advantage of having a mobile phone for me is that i can make a call anytime & everywhere i want, it's not an advantage i can be reached everywhere i am.
Ofcourse, this is for my private phone, if you have a bussiness phone, it other rules apply.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.