Optimizations for Increasing Battery Life

Introduction

While developing an Android application, it’s critical to keep battery usage in mind. If our application quickly drains the device’s battery, users will be hesitant to use the app. Therefore, it’s important to be mindful of the app’s battery usage to provide a good user experience.

Several factors can affect the battery’s performance. For example, applications making frequent network calls will drain the battery faster. Applications with multiple background tasks also affect the battery’s performance. Moreover, if our application fetches the device’s GPS location multiple times, it will lead to degraded battery performance.

In this lesson, we’ll learn about key considerations to ensure optimal device battery life.

Considerations for increasing battery life

Let’s consider a few scenarios that lead to increased battery usage and how to mitigate them.

Network usage

Too many network calls can lead to degraded battery performance. We can design our application to use cached data in certain scenarios. We can rely on cached data if the API response doesn’t change frequently or if real-time data isn’t critical for the app’s performance.

For example, when the user visits the profile page in the app, we don’t need to call the getUserProfile API every single time. We can cache the profile response for a few minutes without impacting the user experience.

While using Retrofit, we can define an HTTP interceptor that returns the locally cached response if the response isn’t older than five minutes. We can define a CacheInterceptor class as follows: