Category: Applications sobriety

By facilitating access to digital solutions, the number of mobile application users will increase significantly. Mechanically the rate of commitment related to the service offered will also increase. This metric is essential to an application’s success. Without accessibility, the risk that users don’t use the service is high. And if the engagement rate is low, the revenue from the application could be heavily impacted.

The success and adherence of an application are too often reduced to ASO (App Store Optimization) or SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If the application is well ranked, then users will be at the rendezvous.

But the performance criterion is actually only very little taken into account by the applications. Indeed, we consider that all users have a fast connection and a high-end smartphone. But it’s totally wrong.

Why do we have this feeling of speed and access by all?

Operator communications are numerous on the speed and the good coverage of the network. For instance, operators advertise 98% coverage of the population for 4G. This is for them an differentiation asset.

And new technologies announcements reinforce the idea that current technologies are widely deployed. 5G communications make indeed the 4G thing outdated. This is the case of Xiaomi who recently unveiled the first 5G smartphone.

Moreover, the current technologies deployment seems to have no limit: 4G is on the moon

The feeling of connection speed is also due to the fact that decision makers and application designers are in perfect connection conditions zones (urban areas, premises with fiber connection…). The used analytics tools at the application editors don’t help. Indeed, how to know that a user exists if he doesn’t connect … The abundance of data makes the analysis of connection problems too difficult to achieve.

What is really on the side of the users?

The ARCEP reports since 2000 a digital barometer that counts the figures of the true use of the mobile in France. Its 2018 edition presents the following observations:

• 61% of mobile owners use 4G networks (compared to 42% in 2016)
• This figure drops to 51% in municipalities with less than 2000 inhabitants.

We can notice that we are still far from the promise of 100% coverage.
And this is confirmed by OpenSignal which realizes real measurements through user tests.

According to the measures, France has a coverage rate of 68%. Interestingly, the average connection speed at 25 Mbps is not among the best. This raises an important factor to take into account: the quality of the infrastructure (Operators, antennas …). The countries, the different areas even within the same city have inequalities in terms of coverage 4G:

For example, here is the network coverage map of downtown Nantes (France, 44):

We notice that there are very few areas in dark green (color meaning good network coverage) and many areas in red (bad coverage).
In the end, network coverage and user speed is very variable. This is the same observation both locally and globally. Overall, users are unsatisfied with the 4G connection.

The deployment of technologies is accelerating so everything will be back to normal?

The belief in the evolution of technologies could make us believe that this situation is cyclical and that everything will soon return to order. This is the reassuring message from the operators, not only in France but also in countries that seem less advanced in terms of deployment.

It’s also the message of the politicians who announce the high speed of connection accessible to all. However it’s only a strategy and empty promises. The reality is much more complex.

On the one hand, we can see it even if new technologies are deployed, access for all may take longer. Many users are still in 2G. And this for many reasons. 100% coverage is impossible as we have observed but also some areas will always be white. The new buildings built with full metal are Faraday cages that block the waves and make access to networks complicated. This is only an example but we could mention a multitude of similar situations.

And even if you get 100% coverage, users’ equipment should follow closer. It would be necessary to be equipped with the latest generation of smartphones. And this isn’t necessarily the willingness of users to change as often. In any case, repackaging tends to maintain older generation equipment on the market. 1 in 3 French people say they have bought a used phone. But there is only a little luck that these phones integrate the 5G quickly.

The promises of new technologies are also often overestimated. The arrival of the 5G is associated with more speed. This isn’t that simple. The 5G will allow new uses (that of the IoT for example) and decongest the 4G network… In other words, if you expect to reach all mobile users, you must rely on the fact that a large part of them won’t in perfect connection conditions.

What impact on the business of your application or that of your services?

The use of mobile in different areas has become widespread. For example, that of M-Commerce, according to the french ARCEP study, 61% of mobile users make purchases with their smartphone. It’s basically the same statistics in other countries. In England, it’s 41%. The income of an application is generated and based on the number of users. But if the user has a bad experience or even if he can’t go after his desire to buy because of bad experience, the income will not be at the rendez-vous.

Lack of performance is one of the criteria for user disengagement. As we have seen, a large part of your users will be in non-optimal connection conditions. In this case, the application will probably be less responsive or unusable in some cases. For reference, we have measured with our tool GREENSPECTOR loading times of up to 4 minutes for some applications in 2G. In the end, the risk that the user uninstalls the application is high. In addition, the uninstall rate at 30 days is 28%. It’s even more important in some countries, such as developing countries, for reasons of space and heaviness. In this case, connection problems are very important for membership. This matches the observed data on the web performance side where 53% of visitors leave the site if it doesn’t load in less than 3 seconds (Chrome Dev Summit 2017).

Impacts other than economic ones?

If your application isn’t functional for slow connections, some users will not be able to use your services. You will therefore exclude users. And this exclusion doesn’t go in the direction of the social pillar of sustainable development which, among other things, requires the inclusion of all populations.

In the same way, if your application works poorly with slower networks, it will consume more battery. And here is the environmental pillar that you will not respect.

How to act?

Don’t wait for feedback from your users or those of your monitoring tools to act. A user who cann’t connect to your application may not be visible or reassembled in your data. It’s therefore necessary to anticipate and detect potential performance issues.

• 1) When designing and expressing the requirement, ask and specify that your solution is usable is visible under limited connection conditions. This can simply be summarized as “my application, or such function, can load in less than 3s on a 2G connection”
• 2) It’s necessary to test your solution in limited connections (2G, 3G …) automatically or manually.
• 3) You can monitor user performance through monitoring tools. Be careful however because it’s very possible that many users aren’t visible at all from these tools.

  Solutions 1 and 2 are the solutions we advocate and use at GREENSPECTOR. Solution 3 is possible with GREENSPECTOR by measuring the solution immediately after going into production.

Olivier PHILIPPOT

Digital Sobriety Expert
Books author «Green Patterns», «Green IT – Gérer la consommation d’énergie de vos systèmes informatiques», …
Speaker (VOXXED Luxembourg, EGG Berlin, ICT4S Stockholm, …)
Green Code Lab Founder, ecodesign software national association

Your phone battery is discharging too fast? When buying your smartphone, the seller has promised you a battery life of 3 days. After one month, you recharge it every day (the phone, not the seller). Maybe the seller (and probably the constructor with him) lied to you about the actual capabilities of the phone? Since the Volkswagen case, we are no longer sure of anything … But the problem is probably more complex. You may not be using your smartphone correctly, or you may be choosing the services that aren’t suit your needs as well.

{{% note %}}
Article to read with some tracks to listen to

Music associated with the topic of the article and according to the tastes (With a distant report on the subject, I admit it):

• MattLm – Battery Low
• Metallica – Battery
• Damso – Batterie faible
  {{% /note %}}

The music or the autonomy of the phone, you must choose!

It’s a long way from listening to music with an MP3 player or even a cassette player (for the older ones). Now, as for many uses, the smartphone has replaced the different readers. We don’t recharge batteries, but we charge the battery of the smartphone. Especially that there are many moments in everyday life to listen to music: in public transport, at the office, by car, in the evening to fall asleep …

And there are many ways to listen to music: apps like Deezer, Live Radio, Youtube, locally stored MP3 … But what’s the least consumer way for your battery?

Measurement protocol

This study was done on a Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone. Some results may vary on different devices, however they provide a trend for the digital services that have been evaluated.

I want to choose the least consumer service

So you always have the screen turned on and you particularly like to zap between the tracks. Consider that you are in Wi-Fi and the sound volume is on a medium level.

You can reduce your phone’s battery life by up to 3.5 hours depending on which service you use It’s usually best to play an MP3 that you have stored on the phone. You don’t use an internet connection, so there is less consumption that results. However, we see that apps like Google Play will tend to consume a lot more autonomy than playing music on the Internet (Deezer, [Spotify](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details? id = com.spotify.music), Youtube…). Be careful therefore to choose the player for your MP3 files. Android will tell you in all cases the most consuming applications, you can then make your choice.

Internet radio isn’t the most interesting solution. Pre-downloaded podcasts will be preferred. Indeed, the internet connection coupled with the browser make that the radio players aren’t the most effective.

What if I lower the volume of the audio ?

Does the sound volume affect battery consumption?

Yes and no, for a low to medium level, consumption does not vary much. However, if you use your smarphone as a speaker to broadcast sound around you, the consumption will be higher (2h20 of autonomy less). If you want to hear the louder sound, the headphones will be more useful. Don’t wait for a significant reduction in consumption with a headset.

And if I’m mobile with 4G?

Is it good listening to music on public transport where there is no Wi-Fi network?

Well this at a cost, and a significant cost. It’s best to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The summary of consumption while listening to music on the Youtube application and all in 4G.

And if I turn off my screen?

Some applications allow to go into sleep mode (or background mode) and let the screen turns off. If so, you will be able to save battery power. The ranking between services hardly changes, you just reduce consumption. Deezer actually becomes the most consumer. It seems that the background treatments aren’t optimized enough within the application.

So what?

Uses vary, depending on tastes, habits, smartphone … and energy consumption too. It’s thus possible to obtain a “range” of autonomy in continuous reading from 4h to 13h.

It’s also possible to change habits to increase autonomy. To go further in this process: identify consumer applications on OS and challenge publishers by asking them to improve is all it’s possible.

That’s green?

Yes, less energy consumption will reduce the load on the battery, so you will perform fewer charge cycles, longevity of the battery will be higher (it’s the cycles of reloading / unloading that l use), and you will extend the overall life of the battery (which is very polluting) see your smartphone.

This study was conducted with the GREENSPECTOR tool that measure the energy consumption of applications on real devices. For more information on methodologies and tools, we invite you to browse this blog.

Olivier PHILIPPOT

Digital Sobriety Expert
Books author «Green Patterns», «Green IT – Gérer la consommation d’énergie de vos systèmes informatiques», …
Speaker (VOXXED Luxembourg, EGG Berlin, ICT4S Stockholm, …)
Green Code Lab Founder, ecodesign software national association

2020 Edition: what are the best browsers to use on mobile?

The internet browser is one of the most critical applications of your smartphone. It allows you to access a multitude of services (Social Network, news, games …). It’s even more so when you don’t want to download an app and prefer to use a mobile site instead. Your browser is used almost continuously on your phone. It’s therefore responsible for some of the decline in the battery life of your smartphone.

It’s therefore important to choose the best browser if you want to increase the life of your smartphone.

Ranking

Find the methodology of this ranking at the end of the article.

We obtain a range of different browsers that varies between 6h15 and 7h26. This may seem small as a difference but over the total battery life of your smartphone, you will less stress your battery and ultimately avoid planned obsolescence. Not to mention a prolonged autonomy at the end of the day!

The browsers

Top 1: Brave

New browser on the market, Brave wants to make privacy a workhorse. It automatically blocks ads and trackers. This seems to pay on autonomy since Brave takes the lead with 7h26mn estimated autonomy for a continuous web use.

Top 2: Firefox Focus

Mozilla publishes Firefox Focus, a browser focused on privacy: default privacy policy, blocking tackers … It seems that just like Brave, this strategy allows to gain autonomy.

Top 3: Dolphin

Much less known than Chrome or Firefox, Dolphin is however very downloaded. With features similar to Chrome or Firefox, it’s a challenger to take very seriously.

Top 4: Opera

The Opera browser has an ad blocker and the ability to create a personalized homepage with a news feed. Its Mini version exists but could not be evaluated in this study. The autonomy is quite good but inferior of 30 minutes compared to our top 1: Brave.

Top 5: Ecosia

Based on Chromium, this German browser finances sustainable development actions (such as tree replanting) with searches carried out by users. Even if autonomy is not the worst, it’s unfortunate that this browser who wants only the good of the planet is not better placed in the ranking!

Top 6: Samsung internet

This is the browser pre-installed on all Samsung phones: Samsung Internet. Consumption close to that of Ecosia, probably because the browser is also based on Chromium.

Top 7: Chrome

Chrome, the Google Android browser, one of the most used browsers. The home page allows to consult a selection of articles of press. He’s in the top 3 of the worst browsers. Some heaviness coming from the history of the solution and the non-priority on privacy.

Top 8: Microsoft Edge

The new Microsoft engine is now available on Android. Maybe the bottom of the rankings is due to the non-adaptation of the engine for Android.

Top 9: Firefox

Published by Mozilla, the browser announces a reliability on the respect of the private life. We are, however, disappointed with his place in this ranking.

Conclusion

The choice of the browser should not only be about autonomy, but it is an important criterion. We observe that the 3 historical and recognized players (Microsoft, Google and Mozilla) are at the bottom of the ranking. This is probably due to the age of the applications, and therefore overweight code (Obesiciel or bloatware). But we can also go watch a performance race that was made at the expense of autonomy. Maybe the race between the 3 has not been beneficial to their improvement. We remember, for example, the Microsoft Edge benchmark … with only Chrome and Firefox. Maybe the arrival of new serious browsers will change the game.

We can note that the differences in autonomy between browsers are also related to certain features like the news feeds on the default home pages. However, the user has a margin of maneuver: disable these features if he doesn’t use them.

Note that the base open source Chromium which is found in different browsers (Brave, Samsung Internet, Ecosia …) isn’t necessarily the most optimized (We find most browsers in the middle of the ranking.) An optimization of the heart (and potentially better integration by publishers) would reduce the consumption of several browsers. Here we see the potential of open source that isn’t used fully.

A highlight of this benchmark, newcomers to the market with a real position on privacy are at the top of the ranking (Brave and Firefox Focus). Respect for privacy and the environment go in the same direction. This is a good signal for users.

Methodology

We perform our measurements of the real energy consumption of the phone with the tool GREENSPECTOR. The Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone was used for this Benchmark.

The methodology aims to achieve a journey that is representative of the use of a user. We study how the browser behaves on the same course. The course lasts 5 minutes and is carried out 4 times to obtain reliable measurements.

Beforehand a preparation of the phone is carried out:

• Mastered configuration (brightness, Wi-Fi enabled …)
• Closing all applications and services: Allows not to be polluted by other applications and to have reliable measurements
• Removing browser caches
• Stabilized network access

The following course is then realized:

• Launching the browser on the home page configured at installation
• 20-second wait (foreground): measures the impact of the home page.
• For 3 sites of different types (Wikipedia, lemonde.fr, pinterest): Launch of the page, Scroll at the bottom of the page, wait of 20 seconds
• Launch again of the 3 sites to evaluate the impact of the caching
• Background browser setting (background): lets you see how the browser behaves when it is not in front of the phone.

The unit energy consumption obtained is then projected on continuous use to obtain final autonomy.

For information, here is the raw data of measured energy:

Olivier PHILIPPOT

Digital Sobriety Expert
Books author «Green Patterns», «Green IT – Gérer la consommation d’énergie de vos systèmes informatiques», …
Speaker (VOXXED Luxembourg, EGG Berlin, ICT4S Stockholm, …)
Green Code Lab Founder, ecodesign software national association

Some apps like Youtube, Google Chrome or Twitter offer a not white but black wallpaper. This “Night” mode or dark theme dedicated to a night use, facilitates reading at night, rest your eyes and especially you avoid turning into a lighthouse. But what about your battery?

We chose to compare the “Day” and “Night” mode of the Twitter app for this battle of efficiency.

(Re)discover our other comparative articles on Twitter & Twitter Lite ainsi qu’Instagram & Instagram Lite.

Twitter Night mode

The transition to “Night” mode is very simple:

• Open your Twitter application
• Click on the bubble of your profile at the top left of your screen
• Click on the moon icon at the bottom left of your screen

You can also enable or disable the “Night” mode from Settings:

• Go to “Settings and Privacy”
• Go to “Display and Sound”
• Click on “Night mode”

And here is the result of the “Night” mode versus the “Day” mode:

Quel gain pour l’énergie ?

Over 30 seconds, the “Day” mode will consume 3.92 mAh and the “Night” mode 2.98 mAh. The “Night” mode is therefore less consumer -23%. Why ? The measurement was made on a Samsung Galaxy S7 that has an AMOLED screen. These screens are much less consumer on dark colors, find our explanatory article about it on our blog.

Does that make a difference to the autonomy of my phone? Absolutely! With the “Day” mode enabled, 1 hour of social network (including Twitter) will discharge the battery of 15% whereas in mode “Night”, the discharge will be only 11%.

This is a victory for the “Night” mode!

Note: The measurements were done simply with the GREENSPECTOR tool on a Samsung Galaxy S7. I invite you to browse this blog for more information on tools and methodology.

Olivier PHILIPPOT

Digital Sobriety Expert
Books author «Green Patterns», «Green IT – Gérer la consommation d’énergie de vos systèmes informatiques», …
Speaker (VOXXED Luxembourg, EGG Berlin, ICT4S Stockholm, …)
Green Code Lab Founder, ecodesign software national association

The ranking that we conducted within GREENSPECTOR is based on M-Tourism Hotel Reservation applications among the most used in France to compare their consumption in energy and resources according to frequent use scenarios.

Kimberley DERUDDER

Kimberley DERUDDER has been digital marketing manager at Greenspector for more than 5 years. Kimberley graduated with a master’s degree in Marketing – Communication and specialized in Inbound Marketing after her first two years at Greenspector. Today in charge of the animation of the marketing, social media and lead generation strategy, she also takes care of app comparisons and battles.

Android 9 Pie (API level 28) introduces a new battery management feature: the Adaptive Battery. Depending on the user’s use of the applications, the system will restrict certain mechanisms for the applications.

New feature on Android 9 Pie : Adaptive Battery

The system prioritizes the use of resources on the frequency of use of applications and their recent date of use. 5 classes of applications (buckets) have been implemented:

• Active: The user frequently uses the application. Some architectural criteria are also taken into account: starting activities, foreground service, user clicking on a notification …
• Working set: The application is used frequently but is not always active. For example, a social network application will be assigned as Working set. An application used indirectly will also be in this class.
• Frequent: The application is used frequently but not necessarily daily.
• Rare: An application used irregularly. For example an airline flight reservation application for an individual.
• Never: The application has been installed but has never been used.

The algorithm is based on artificial intelligence (AI), it’s likely that the learning phase will take several days. However many applications will likely be assigned to the Frequent bucket or the Rare one. System applications or Google applications (Maps, Camera…) will probably be in Working Set while the usual applications (Bank, Travel…) may be classified as Frequent. The implementation of the algorithm will also depend on the smartphone manufacturer.

Adaptive Battery restrictions

Depending on the buckets, several restrictions will be put in place:

• Job
• Alarm
• Network
• Firebase Cloud Messaging

This means that several features of your applications could be impacted:

• Network request to update resources
• Information download
• Background process
• Periodic calls to system APIs…

The restrictions will be as follows :

How to increase the ranking of an application?

One of the ways to avoid declassification is to have the user assign your application in the Doze whitelist. Applications freom this whitelist are exempt from restrictions.

• If your application does not have a launcher activity, think about implementing one if possible.
• It’s important that your users can interact with notifications.
• Don’t clutter your user with too many notifications, otherwise the user could block them and your application will be downgraded.

Testing difficulty

It will be difficult to predict which class your app will be assigned to. It’s likely that its usage will be fragmented, hence your application may end up in any of the 5 classes. If you want to know the class of your application (but noly after your own usage), you can use the API :

It’s however necessary to test your application in all of the different cases. For this you can place the application in the desired class using ADB:

adb shell am set-standby-bucket packagename active|working_set|frequent|rare

It’s obvious that such new testing need will increase the duration of the tests.

Note that if you have a multi-apk application, it’s possible that all APKs aren’t in the same class. It’s therefore important to think about a suitable test strategy.

Does the Adaptive battery really reduce battery consumption?

Since the announcement of this feature (associated with the Artificial Intelligence buzzword) many speculations on its operating mode have been heard: Android would store the most used applications, would allow significant energy gains… Google announced a 30% CPU gain during application launch. Now this figure was actually true but in a Google-centric context. We are more likely around 5% off. The implementation of Adaptive battery is indeed more restricted: depending on the use, some treatments, especially in the background, are delayed. This allows for example, in some cases where the user would have little battery left, to postpone a treatement hoping that it happens when the device is charged. But note that if the treatment is postponed, it’s in no way suppressed. (Source). The Adaptive battery will allow for higher gains as developers use alarms and jobs. An Artificial Intelligence that would drastically reduce energy consumption may be a goal for Android, but we are only witnessing the beginnings.

Each new version of Android has brought more energy management features (Doze, Adaptive battery …). However the gains for the end users are hard to quantify. In any case, it all comes down to the battery life of our smartphones, and we are still to witness a game changing extent in its duration. However what these novelties bring to us, is that they shed some additional light on the applications that are detected as high consumers by the system. The consequence may be severe: the user having been alerted may choose to uninstall these applications.

So… what can we do?

It’s difficult right now to predict how the Adapative Battery system will perceive the applications and sort them in the buckets (Frequently used, Rarely …). However three points are of the utmost importance:

• An efficient, fluid and well-designed application will probably be used more often. Beyond the good practices that are given in this article, it’s important to have a high level of quality for one’s application. This involves more testing, high quality control, gather resources consumption and energy metrics …
• Background tasks set via Alarms and Jobs, as well as network treatments are targeted by Android. It’s important to design an effective application architecture and to test the behavior of these tasks. And to do this in various conditions: different network connection, fragmented platforms ….
• OS editors and devices manufacturers are still looking for mechanisms to prevent applications from using too much battery. As an application developer, it’s critical to anticipate this issue. Indeed, the key to the problem is the design of applications. If applications don’t improve their behavior, systems may continue to put constraining – and somwehat inefficient – mechanisms into place.

Olivier PHILIPPOT

Digital Sobriety Expert
Books author «Green Patterns», «Green IT – Gérer la consommation d’énergie de vos systèmes informatiques», …
Speaker (VOXXED Luxembourg, EGG Berlin, ICT4S Stockholm, …)
Green Code Lab Founder, ecodesign software national association

The study that we conducted within GREENSPECTOR is based on fashion M-Commerce applications among the most used in France in order to compare their energy consumption and resources according to frequent use scenarios.

Kimberley DERUDDER

Kimberley DERUDDER has been digital marketing manager at Greenspector for more than 5 years. Kimberley graduated with a master’s degree in Marketing – Communication and specialized in Inbound Marketing after her first two years at Greenspector. Today in charge of the animation of the marketing, social media and lead generation strategy, she also takes care of app comparisons and battles.

Do you want to follow the FIFA World Cup 2018? Know minute by minute how accurate your predictions are? And most importantly, you don’t want to run out of battery before the end of the match! We have selected for you 10 applications that allow you to follow the match live results.

Ronan THEPAULT

Ronan is part of the sales and marketing team. His passion ? The battles! He particularly likes to measure the applications and to oppose them!

In this article, we explain the issues of mobile applications energy and performance, and how to detect them before your users.

Performance and energy, essential criteria for mobile applications

The performance of a digital solution is an important criterion for user.
Without performance, users will be critical and in the worst case will no longer use the service. This factor has been reinforced with mobility, given the less powerful platforms and networks with unequal characteristics. To this was added the problem of energy. Indeed, it’s uncommon that the mobile platforms are powered up continuously!

Late detection of energy and performance issues

Before the arrival of smartphones, performance requirements had been mainly focused on server-side load tests. Development teams continued this process by adding some performance tests on emulators or on their own phones.

This approach makes it possible to detect some performance issues but is however limited. On the one hand, the network connections and devices of the development teams are generally of a good level and not sufficiently representative of those of the end users; on the other hand, the energy problem is never taken into account. Indeed, tests are performed on Wi-fi connections with fiber optics and an emulator running on a powerful developer station. Very far from a 2G connection on a refurbished phone.

In the end, the solution passes the testing phase stage for the start of production but feed backs from the field are numerous. One can anticipate this with Real User Monitoring’s tools, however the cost of analysis of the problems and correction is high (and doesn’t take into account the issues of energy).

Detect issues before going into production

In order to improve your mobile digital service, it’s necessary to detect the maximum number of issues before going into production. And this is possible by applying a structured and targeted test strategy that will run on test phones.

It’s first necessary to identify the main types of use of the application. Don’t rule out the possibility of testing with the excuse of fragmentation. This just requires to identify 2 or 3 types of user: user with a state of the art phone and 4G connection, mobile user with a medium range phone, user in uncovered area with a refurbished phone. This makes it possible to set up the platforms on which you will test (here 3 types of telephones) as well as the connections (Wi-fi, 3G, 2G).

Then, it’s not necessary to set up tests that cover 100% of your features. The idea is rather to control that the main use of the application responds to acceptable criteria of performance and energy consumption, and that in all the parameters of executions that you have defined (Platform and connection).

Pre-production detection with GREENSPECTOR

GREENSPECTOR‘s users apply this strategy through the use of particular features:

• Tests on real phones of different generations
• Integration of automated tests or launch of manual tests
• Modification of the means of connection of devices (Wifi, 2G…)
• Measure the performance and energy of each application feature

In the end, before each release into production (or even more regularly), the execution of targeted test campaigns on real mobile devices makes it possible to detect the main energy and performance issues.

Olivier PHILIPPOT

Digital Sobriety Expert
Books author «Green Patterns», «Green IT – Gérer la consommation d’énergie de vos systèmes informatiques», …
Speaker (VOXXED Luxembourg, EGG Berlin, ICT4S Stockholm, …)
Green Code Lab Founder, ecodesign software national association

The obsolescence of our mobile devices (PC, smartphones but also connected objects) is now a known, worrying phenomenon and that many people are experiencing. But let’s analyze together the “why” of this obsolescence. And yet, we have a simple answer for you: the strong call of the battery.

The batteries of our mobile devices are mainly lithium-ion technologies. The chemistry of those batteries leads to a certain lifespan. This lifetime is difficult to predict; the parameters influencing the battery life being numerous: charge / recharge cycle, temperature, solicitation…

Manufacturers announce 1,000 cycles before the end of battery life. At 500 cycles, the battery capacity has already decreased by 20%. Considering the daily recharges of our smartphones, we can estimate the battery’s life at around 3 years. But it’s possible to feel a greater loss of capacity before this time, and want to change the battery, or even the smartphone before. Hence a strong cause of obsolescence.

This phenomenon would not be so serious if it only had an economic impact. However, it’s not negligible from the ecological point of view. Smartphones and mainly batteries have a strong environmental impact, especially due to their manufacture. 85% of their impact in C02 equivalent comes from the manufacturing phase.

What about the use of the phone in all this?

The charging and discharging cycles of the phone depend on how you use your phone. Not only the number and duration of your calls: smartphones have become our life support, all applications and services that will be on your phone will have a share of consumption.

One of the solutions is to change the uses and behaviors:

• Listen to audio music and not via video applications such as Youtube
• Pre-load your mobile Google Map routes
• Cut some network interfaces when you do not need them
• Switch to airplane mode at night
• Cut the notifications of social networks (in addition it’s good for a digital detox cure)
• …

What about the applications?

You will understand: energy consumption is everywhere. And not all applications have the same consumption for the same purpose. If the application uses a lot of resources: CPU, GPU, radio cell… then the energy consumed will also increase. This will directly impact the battery life of your device, which will discharge faster, so recharge / discharge cycles will be more frequent.

Therefore it’s necessary to choose the right application. How? Unfortunately there is no label or measurement. Manufacturers like Huawei, Samsung or publishers like Android now notify consumer applications draining the battery of your phone. You can therefore act by selecting a less consuming application.

In the meantime, you can identify consuming apps by going to your phone’s settings. On most mobile devices, there is a Battery or Power Options tab (available from the settings) the tab opened, gives you access to the Battery Use under the name Economy of energy or even Application Consumption depending on the models. Here you will find the most consuming applications.

Memory effect due to applications?

The memory effect is the phenomenon that is triggered when the battery is too discharged: you lose some of the battery capacity. This phenomenon doesn’t exist as it stands for new batteries. Indeed, it appeared rather for older generation technologies (Ni-MH for example). By cons you may have already observed a phenomenon: the battery of your smartphone is not empty but is at a low level (between 10 and 20%), you launch an action on the phone (usually an action or an application rather heavy as for example a mapping system with GPS) and the smartphone quickly indicates that the level is very low and it turns off even automatically. You wait a few seconds and turn on your phone. The battery level is no longer at 0 but at a higher level.

This is due to a phenomenon of imbalance of lithium-ion cells. If the device makes a big voltage call (because it needs a lot of resources) it will have an imbalance. If the battery doesn’t have a lot of capacity, it will make some cells unusable, the total capacity of the battery will therefore decrease.

It is essential that the application not only does not consume a lot of energy over time (which will create a conventional discharge) but also does not require too much energy at a time T. And this is unfortunately the case for some applications: GPS consumption with data sending in parallel, heavy processing at the same time of receiving data from the servers…

My app is heating up my phone

Indirect effect of applications on the life of applications: If the application consumes a lot of resources, some components like the CPU or GPU will heat up. Given the small size of smartphones, the battery will also heat up. And as the chemical behavior of the battery deteriorates with increasing temperature, the service life will also decrease.

Conclusion?

Several events have recently made talk about batteries: you probably remember cases of Galaxy Note 7 battery explosions, or even more of the slowdown of Apple’s iPhones… The miniaturization of devices coupled with the increase in the use of digital services leads to increasingly solicit certain components. The battery is one of these components. Beyond an inconvenience of use (need to recharge the phone regularly), the environmental impact of battery replacement is strong. Especially since some manufacturers don’t allow their replacement, which increases the environmental cost by replacing the smartphone.

Improving Uses and Behaviors is a track but treating the problem at the source is the solution that Greenspector‘s users have chosen: Decrease the energy consumption of applications to improve the user experience while limiting the environmental impact due to obsolescence.

Olivier PHILIPPOT

Digital Sobriety Expert
Books author «Green Patterns», «Green IT – Gérer la consommation d’énergie de vos systèmes informatiques», …
Speaker (VOXXED Luxembourg, EGG Berlin, ICT4S Stockholm, …)
Green Code Lab Founder, ecodesign software national association