14 DAY TRIAL // Good news for Android fans worried about their smartphones' battery life, as Google has now made it easier to track all the apps and services that are using energy.
Many handset makers aren't that transparent when it comes to what's eating your battery life and doesn't allow smartphone owners to see all the necessary stats.
But that will change with Android 6.0 Marshmallow's release since Google made it absolutely mandatory for all OEMs to provide battery stats into their devices.
The folks over at AndroidPolice have spotted an official document (Marshmallow Compatibility Definition Document) that explains how OEMs are to proceed when it comes to transparent accounting for power usage.
Marshmallow users will now be able to see what's eating their battery life
Here is a short excerpt of what Google strongly recommends when it comes to battery consumption stats in Android 6.0 Marshmallow:
“A more accurate accounting and reporting of the power consumption provides the app developer both the incentives and the tools to optimize the power usage pattern of the application.
Therefore, device implementations MUST be able to track hardware component power usage and attribute that power usage to specific applications. Specifically, implementations:
- MUST provide a per-component power profile that defines the current consumption value for each hardware component and the approximate battery drain caused by the components over time as documented in the Android Open Source Project site [Resources, 123]. - MUST report all power consumption values in milliampere hours (mAh) - SHOULD be attributed to the hardware component itself if unable to attribute hardware component power usage to an application. - MUST report CPU power consumption per each process's UID. The Android Open Source Project meets the requirement through the uid_cputime kernel module implementation.”
Thanks to the new changes enforced by Google, users will now be able to access accurate information about battery stats inside their Android devices.
On top of that, we will now be able to see what OEMs have been hiding from us for a few years now since they were allowed to do that in previous version of Android.