Android phone app uses up the battery quickly

[petterreinholdtsen]

The android phone app reduces the life time of the phone quite a lot when it is running in the background. Can something be done to reduce the power consumption?

[quixotique]

We have lots of ideas to improve the power efficiency of Serval DNA, and there is almost certainly plenty of low-hanging fruit as far as reducing the CPU load of Serval DNA when idle. This topic is now documented in the Roadmap on the Developer Wiki under Energy Efficiency.

I would like to close this issue, not because we are uninterested in battery life issues, but because we aim to use GitHub Issues to track bugs or tasks with a narrow, concrete description and remedy. An Issue ought to be something a developer can cherry pick to work on without having to embark on a high-level design or consultation process. Broader issues are documented in the Roadmap on the Wiki and up for discussion in the Developers Mailing List.

Once we have a concrete programming task that will yield improvements in battery life, it can be posted as a GitHub Issue in the appropriate component (Batphone or Serval DNA).

[lakeman]

As of ba68c73, battery usage should be much lower. Though there is still room for improvement as an ongoing activity.

[petterreinholdtsen]

Great to hear. When you measure, by how much does this new patch extend battery lifetime?

[lakeman]

So far I've only performed one long test, which showed a 1% duty cycle when the network was up, but there were no detected network peers. In this case, the battery should last 100x longer (in theory).
More details;
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/serval-project-developers/vrs4ly11ZOA/3DSc9ZJV3aMJ