Android L uses 36% less battery power than KitKat

As you may or may not know, Google has a knack for focusing on one particular “project” during the development of each major Android release. Jelly Bean had Project Butter, an initiative to improve the overall speed and performance of the mobile operating system through smoother animations. KitKat brought us Project Svelte which optimized the installation to run on just 512MB of RAM for entry-level hardware. In Android L, the search-and-everything-else giant is focusing its attention on improved battery life through Project Volta. An entire session was spent on the subject during Google’s recent I/O conference but how well does it actually work at this stage in the development process? To answer that question, Ars Technica recently put Android L’s Project Volta to the test. So how did it fare? According to the test results, pretty damn good actually.

For each Android release, Google likes to have a “Project” that picks an area of weakness and focuses on tuning the whole OS to fix it. In Jelly Bean we had Project Butter, a concerted effort to make Android’s UI animations run at 60fps. In KitKat there was Project Svelte, which aimed to get the OS running on only 512MB of RAM. Now in Android L we have “Project Volta,” an attempt to boost the battery life of Android devices. Like the projects that came before it, Volta is a wide-ranging effort that touches many different parts of the OS. Google did some testing and found that waking a device up for one second burns two minutes of standby time. This isn’t just turning the screen on—it also means an app waking the processor and modem to check for updates. To cut down on this battery burn, Android L has a new “JobScheduler” API that allows the OS to batch up unimportant app requests like database cleanup and log uploading. Developers can also request that housekeeping functions be delayed until the device is plugged in. Further, the OS will not wake the device up for a network task when there is no network connectivity. Google also made an enhanced battery stat tracker called “Battery Historian.” The tool added a ton of new power-tracking capabilities and allowed the company to visualize all that data in a pretty chart. Better analytics gave Google more insight into what was using all that power, which allowed it to tweak things all over the OS for better battery life.