Android M continues Google’s quest for a better life cycle

Jun 8, 2015 08:15 GMT  ·  By

Google announced Android M at its I/O 2015 conference a few weeks ago and said it would come with some interesting new features, including Doze and App Standby.

The tech giant detailed the two new features and told us what to expect in theory. But an important question arose: how will these new feats actually perform in real life? Well, the folks at Computer Base decided to use their Nexus 5 to answer this question. So they installed Android M Developer Preview on it and used Doze and App Standby to draw some conclusions.

Now, for those of you who aren’t in the loop about these new features, we’re going to take the opportunity to detail them for you a little bit.

Doze

Doze is a feat that allows you to put the device in a low-power sleep state when it is not in use. This new functionality takes advantage of motion detection sensors in order to be able to tell when the phone is idle to put it into a deeper sleep state. The system is then periodically awakened to perform pending operations.

When Doze is active, wake locks are ignored, Wi-Fi scans disabled, sync jobs are not performed, and network access is disabled unless there’s a high-priority Google Cloud Message coming in.

App Standby

As for App Standby, this feature disables network access for apps that haven’t been used in a while. This is possible thanks to the Ignore optimizations setting which tells Google which apps are absolutely vital to your existence and shouldn’t be shut down.

Do they make a difference?

To see how Doze and App Standby actually work in real life, the Nexus 5 running Android M was pitted against a similar model running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop.

The results showed that, after 8 hours of standby, the Nexus 5 with Lollipop had consumed 4% of battery life, while the Nexus 5 with Android M had only eaten up 1.5%.

After 24 hours, the Lollipop version absorbed 12% of power, while the Nexus 5 with Android M was only at 4.5%.

In 48 hours, battery levels on the Lollipop phone had succumbed by 24% compared to the 9% on the Android M handset.

At the end of the test, the Nexus 5 with Lollipop proved to be able to sustain 200 hours of standby, while the Android M one maxed out at 533 hours. This means Android M improves standby time by 2.7 times compared to Android Lollipop. Naturally, these results will vary depending on handsets, but they are still pretty encouraging.