Understanding Mobile Radio State to Build Apps that Don't Drain the Battery

tl;dr: Read the new Android Training Class, Transferring Data Without Draining the Battery, to learn how to potentially halve the battery life impact of your apps' data transfers based on the underlying radio architecture.

One of the beauties of modern smartphone platforms is the abstraction of underlying hardware.

I've been building mobile apps for almost 5 years, and had no idea how the underlying 3G radio worked. I didn't have to. I just open a connection and start downloading data.

Dalvik negotiates a transport mechanism to ensure I get the fastest and most efficient data connection possible. Wi-Fi or mobile, Edge or LTE, it doesn't matter. Or so I thought.

We all know that data transfers on mobile radios chews up a lot of battery, so we're careful to restrict how much we download. It's a balance between app latency and chewing up bandwidth and battery life.

Turns out it's not so much the amount you transfer, but how frequently you power up the radio.

The problem with abstractions is that hiding the complexities means disguising some possible optimizations—something I came to learn after speaking to the good folks at at AT&T and DoCoMo.

Optimizing Downloads for Efficient Network Access explains that to minimize the power drain associated with the mobile radio, it will go into standbye mode whenever it's not in use. Before you can upload or download data the mobile radio needs to be powered-up. Powering up from standby introduces around 2 seconds of latency when making data transfer requests.

No one wants to wait an extra 2s every time they try to follow a link, so rather than dropping straight back to standby, there is a tail-time during which the radio stays active to reduce that latency.

The exact numbers vary depending on the carrier, but once you stop transferring data the radio stays on—at full power—for around 5 seconds. Then stays at a "low energy" state (which introduces some latency, but uses less battery) for around another 12 seconds.

Every data transfer session will cause the radio to draw energy for almost 20 seconds.

As an app developer, knowing that every time you touch the network you can draw power for nearly 20 seconds should have a dramatic impact on the way you structure you data transfer routines.

That includes prefetching, batching your downloads, eliminating redundant downloads, and prefetching even more aggressively when using higher bandwidth (but more power-hungry) radios.

Learn more at Android Training

This is just a brief summary, my Android Training class: Transferring Data Without Draining the Battery teaches you more about the underlying radio hardware, how to use that knowledge to optimize your apps' battery impact, and how to analyze your apps' current transfer profile.