Slashdot Mirror
Android Pie Has a Battery Life Problem (venturebeat.com)
Emil Protalinski, writing for VentureBeat: After upgrading to Android Pie, most users have either seen a slight improvement in battery life or reported no perceivable difference. But soon after we published our story, some users told us that they are experiencing the opposite: significantly higher battery drain after upgrading to Pie. We've been tracking this issue for the past few months, during which the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL launched with Android Pie out-of-the-box and new device owners reported similar problems. Some Android Pie users simply don't expect their phones to make it through the day.
Users on Reddit, the Pixel forums, and Google's issue tracker have been discussing battery life issues on existing devices after upgrading to Android Pie, and some even on new devices (although there are naturally fewer of those cases). VentureBeat was able to independently confirm the issue on a Pixel 2 XL and a Pixel 3 -- we sent the details to Google. Given that Adaptive Battery is the main feature highlight when it comes to battery improvement in Android Pie, many suspected it could be the culprit. Users have reported, however, that turning it off didn't help the situation much, if at all. We were also able to independently verify that Adaptive Battery is not the cause. Adaptive Battery is only available in Pie, but in our tests battery life only drained faster with the feature off. We did, however, confirm that the problem is unique to Android Pie. Users have reported significant battery drain when their phones are idle, anywhere between 10 percent to 20 percent drained in an hour.
Users on Reddit, the Pixel forums, and Google's issue tracker have been discussing battery life issues on existing devices after upgrading to Android Pie, and some even on new devices (although there are naturally fewer of those cases). VentureBeat was able to independently confirm the issue on a Pixel 2 XL and a Pixel 3 -- we sent the details to Google. Given that Adaptive Battery is the main feature highlight when it comes to battery improvement in Android Pie, many suspected it could be the culprit. Users have reported, however, that turning it off didn't help the situation much, if at all. We were also able to independently verify that Adaptive Battery is not the cause. Adaptive Battery is only available in Pie, but in our tests battery life only drained faster with the feature off. We did, however, confirm that the problem is unique to Android Pie. Users have reported significant battery drain when their phones are idle, anywhere between 10 percent to 20 percent drained in an hour.
As a long time Android user I have to say this: there are two areas where Android totally completely utterly sucks: battery management and process management.
Battery management: it's nigh impossible to understand what exactly is draining your memory, how often your device wakes up and what sensors are in use unless you install quite specific apps and grant them quite specific permissions via adb, which is near impossible for 99% of users out there. And even when you do all of that, in most cases you're still left without any solutions because you don't know how to force Android not to use the said sensors or not to wake your device as often as it does. Also, most sensors in Android are 100% nondescript: you're looking at some weird combinations of symbols and digits and in most cases you cannot even Google for them. It's not like Android says: rotation-vector sensor is being used 100% of the time or anything like that.
Process management: in the past you could at least install certain apps which could show overall CPU usage and the CPU usage of each active app. Nowadays, there are no such options even when you enable development mode. Google did that for the sake of security but in the process they made Android even less opaque than it was before. Then you have another issue: which apps are indeed running in memory? which apps are swapped out? which are cached? It's all a fucking mess and unless you've rooted your device your only option is "Memory" [Information] which is simply a fucking abomination as it doesn't even show current info: it only shows aggregated stats for the past 3/6/12/24 hours.
For the past three development cycles (Android 7/8/9) I've created bug reports, i.e. feature requests, in Android bug tracker but each time they were either rejected or abandoned.
Google is hell-bent on making Android's internals opaque for the user and nothing so far has been able to persuade them otherwise.
The end result is that Android users are royally fucked but Google doesn't seem to care one bit.
And then you have this (a little bit outdated but still mostly relevant).
Nor did Apple ever hide or lie about this, as much as Haters like to pretend they did
Jan 23, 2017 - iOS 10.2.1 is released, which is the first version (that we know of) to begin slowing down phones.
For months and months forum posters speculated they may be slowing down the phones. Apple says nothing.
December 18, 2017 - John Poole from Geekbench pulls together benchmarks from 100k iphones and creates irrefutable graphs showing how performance is throttled, and exactly which version it started happening for each iPhone version
December 20, 2017 - Apple finally admits to slowing down phones.
Nope, they didn't hide anything. Its just pure coincidence that Apple sat silent for almost an entire year***, and then suddenly 2 days after the irrefutable evidence surfaces Apple decides they should probably let users know about it.
Yeah, and it's the haters that are pretending, right?
***actually it may have been longer than a year, as apple's December statement admitting to it said they introduced it "last year"