Smartphone battery life is a constant challenge, and something developers need to bear in mind when creating apps, especially ones which constantly poll for data. How can using push notifications avoid your apps turning into a battery hog?
Ice cream picture from Shutterstock
At a developer sessions held as part of today’s official Australian BlackBerry 10 launch, BlackBerry senior manager enterprise developer partnerships John Mutter spruiked the push notification features of BB10 as a way of minimising BlackBerry usage.
“You use 100 times more electricity to transmit than to receive,” Mutter pointed out. “That’s why talk time is so relevant.” It also create an issue if apps are constantly polling for data. “An app which constantly polls for information is killing the battery and getting nothing in return. It’s like a self-licking ice cream,” he said.
Push notifications have been a feature of earlier BlackBerry development platforms, but BB10 takes a more measured approach, restricting individual apps to just 8KB of data. Mutter argues that’s more than sufficient for the kind of database queries that typify many app requests.
“It used to be that push apps had to run in the background and every app developer had to write their own. Using the invocation framework solves that. It’s as real time as possible with little expense to the battery.”
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