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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. Linux on a laptop gets similar battery life to Windows in my experience, and that's without using kernel patches and crazy settings, etc.

Google also invested a lot of time into optimizing battery consumption (which hackers and people like the guy from Commonsware derogatory call "War against background processing"). If you look up through history of Android releases, there isn't a single release where there would't be a pretty major change in how Android puts device to sleep and how it wakes it up again.

That stuff is really hard since a single bad service can drain your battery in matter of hours and needs seriously tight coordination between all software makers on your device to avoid problematic edge cases.

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It's more often a case of misaligned incentives than being all that difficult. When your business model (both Google's and most 3rd party developers) depends on constantly streaming telemetry from a device to a server you're going to have battery life challenges. Much of Google's effort has gone to providing decent battery life while still providing the telemetry. No doubt that a fair amount of effort has gone into specific use cases like background streaming audio apps (i.e. phone/music/etc) but the hours those take are a drop in the bucket compared to making the whole advertising ecosystem work (efficiently enough) on mobile.

The issues I've met when mentoring 3rd party Android developers had very little to do with any kind of telemetry and a lot to do with inherent laziness of "we'll just set a cron job to poll server on 2 minutes, it's easier than thinking about it" mindset. It's pervasive among the newly minted developers capitalising on the engineering pay gold rush.

My first Android phone was a Sony Ericsson Xperia x10i. With that phone I could go to sleep while playing music from the SD card and wake up 8 hours later with plenty of battery left. The same phone however would run out faster if doing stuff over Wifi or using GPS. It was mostly a matter of how much power different things took.

One of the things I want to do on my Librem5 is monitor my servers, so that will involve polling things every few minutes. PowerTop says that I can save power by changing the polling for USB, but that changes Wifi ping times from ~1ms to ~350ms. Eventually I'll probably try experimenting with that to get an option with a 10ms ping time that still saves some power.

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