"Project Volta" that reduces Android's battery consumption and lengthens uptime, its effect is revealed

ByTheen Moy

Google's conference for developers held in June 2014Google I / O 2014In Google, project to reduce battery consumption and make startup time longer "Project VoltaIt has been made clear that it is promoting. It is an attempt aimed at optimizing the operation of the application and making the battery have a long time,Ars TechnicaActually verified its effect, it turned out that it shows quite good results.

Examining Project Volta: We put Android L through our battery test | Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/examining-project-volta-we-put-android-l-through-our-battery-test/

According to the research conducted by Google, it has become evident that the standby time in standby mode is shortened by 2 minutes by activating the device for 1 minute, for example, by activating an application on a conventional Android device. Based on this result, Android L currently being developed is equipped with the API "JobScheduler" aimed at optimizing the operation of the application and suppressing unnecessary consumption of the battery, so that memory cleanup and log file Attempts are being made to reduce battery consumption by defining jobs of applications that do not require frequent updating such as uploading and defining applications to be operated only during charging.

Also, in Android L, a battery status tracker called "Battery Historian" has been introduced, which has the function of monitoring the power consumption status and displaying the measurement result in an easy-to-understand graph. We are trying to figure out which application consumes a lot of power and how much we can reduce consumption by putting in hands.


Ars Technica conducted comparative experiments to see if Google's attempt to reduce battery consumption with these features actually resulted in results. The time it takes for the battery to run out by running measurement scripts in an environment where both OS of Nokia 5 and Android 4. Kit Kit and Preview version of Android L are used to eliminate error per device, Measure. The result was Android L 4.4 KitKat was 345 minutes, while Android L preview version was 361% longer, 471 minutes.


At the time of verification, the screen brightness is set to 200 cd / m 2, the state is constantly kept lit, the terminal is connected to Wi-Fi and the operation of automatically reloading the web page every 15 seconds is continued and the battery The time to break is measured twice, and the average value is calculated. In addition, Android L has a "battery saver" mode that reduces power consumption by lowering the performance of the device when the battery level drops below 15%, but it is turned off for verification.

Although it gave a glimpse of a part of Android L's ability to continue using 36% longer than before, this is still the result of the developer version. It is thought that the power saving function such as JobScheduler has room for further improvement by the correspondence of the application side and it is thought that we can expect to witness even better results as development progresses in the future .