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> The battery life seems short. I'm pretty sure that I charged it up to 99% when I plugged it in this afternoon. It's now 10pm and I just went to check somethin

> The battery life seems short. I'm pretty sure that I charged it up to 99% when I plugged it in this afternoon. It's now 10pm and I just went to check something in Firefox and found that the battery has died already. And I haven't exactly been using it heavily. It's possible that I misunderstood how much I had charged it, but so far this is a bad sign. Battery life is an area that may be difficult for smaller phone makers to compete on. I think Apple especially puts a ton of engineering effort and coordination into making iOS and their apps work efficiently with their hardware, reducing complexity, runtime cycles, and power consumption as much as possible, on top of already highly-efficient ARM hardware. Over years of doing that (kaizen), the result is optimized hardware/software fusion with industry-leading battery life. But it seems like it takes a non-trivial amount of additional engineering time and effort to accomplish this, that will be difficult to match by smaller mobile tech startups. I hope the open source community around Librem and Pine will be able to replicate that effort, but I'm not sure this kind of consistent incremental upgrade work is attractive enough to volunteer FOSS developers. And being maximally effective at it most certainly requires the parent company to coordinate the effort across hardware, software, internal teams, and external volunteers.

rapind 5y ago
I'd love an e-ink phone. That would go a long way towards solving battery issues.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  Usually, battery issues with hardware like that are more about idle time and reaching deep sleep states than active usage time with screen on. The latter is quite reasonable on the Librem 5, the former could be improved.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    An e-ink display would allow for an always on clock though, which would be pretty sweet.
    - coder543 5y ago
      Plenty of Android phones already do this. The Pixel 4a 5G is an example of one, and the always on clock / information screen drains very little battery, while still being really nice. It is baffling to me that Apple still hasn't implemented this feature even on their top end "Pro" iPhones... but this feature by itself isn't enough for me to switch to Android full time.
      - callalex 5y ago
        The feature is not implemented on iPhones so that you are more incentivized to buy their smartwatch.
    - _carbyau_ 5y ago
      Oled screen allows only the pixels required to be lit up. So a 50% brightness thin line clock on Oled androids is pretty common. Not months worth of battery saving like an eInk screen maybe but still enough to be insignificant compared to general "screen off" battery consumption.
    - mackrevinack 5y ago
      seeing as the phone is a chonker, you could maybe fit a thin screen on the top side of the phone, which would let you see some basic info without having to take the phone out of your pocket. (as long as the headphone jack was at the bottom and the power button on the side)
- razemio 5y ago
  Hisense A7 or Yota 3 should be your choice then. Both e-ink phones. Yota with the twist that you have the choice to use e-ink or a normal screen by turning the phone.
  - account-5 5y ago
    I would love an eink based mobile. Can't find anywhere selling the ones you've named in my country though. Back to hoping they'll become more common.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  There are e-ink phones. They don't run regular Android though, with Google Play, just the open source version with some Chinese marketplace. I have followed one (now dead) e-ink phone on indiegogo (forgot the name, sorry), and they wrote that Google does not let (black-and-white) e-ink smartphones pass Android certification, because they cannot correctly display the colors in their apps. So they will never run Google Play, and there will never be just e-ink phone with built-in regular Android and Google Play, sadly. There is a hacky way to get Google Play on the hisense phones, but... ugh. That's too much hackiness for me.
yeetsfromhell 5y ago
Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. Linux on a laptop gets similar battery life to Windows in my experience, and that's without using kernel patches and crazy settings, etc.
- xvector 5y ago
  Android phones have terrible battery efficiency compared to iPhones. The only reason you don't notice is because manufacturers cram in massive batteries to compensate. Same with Linux/Windows versus Macs. It is only recently that Linux/Windows laptops have begun to approach Macs in terms of battery life, and their battery efficiency is still far behind, especially with Apple Silicon being a thing.
  - tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    Got some of that data?
    - jcheng 5y ago
      https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series-screen-power-battery-life-report-long-lasting-devices https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series... Platform Model Life Size Efficiency iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max 21.7 4352 4.98 iOS Apple iPhone 13 16.8 3227 5.21 iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro 16.6 3095 5.37 Android ASUS ROG Phone 5 16.6 6000 2.77 Android ASUS ROG Phone III 16.5 6000 2.75 Android ASUS ROG Phone II 16.2 6000 2.7 Android Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (S888) 15.9 5000 3.18 iOS Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max 15.6 3969 3.93 (Efficiency is just Life / Size * 1000)
      - unobatbayar 5y ago
        Never thought iPhone 13 has bigger battery than iPhone 13 Pro. It's almost as if they deliberately added this seemingly bad option so people would choose the most expensive option iPhone 13 Pro Max. Because it would seem like the best deal out of three. I mean the Pro Max is just $100 more expensive than Pro, right? But remove this decoy option, and most people would just buy the iPhone 13.
wrycoder 5y ago
I’ve personally replaced several iPhone batteries. The aftermarket ones don’t seem to last as long as the Apple OEM ones do.
- ge96 5y ago
  That annoys me so much, only downside of buying used stuff (to me), fake replacement battery specs.
- p1necone 5y ago
  I remember replacement PSP batteries being similar. It was basically impossible to find third party batteries that were as good as OEM ones, even the ones that advertised higher mah numbers than the stock Sony ones were awful (despite even being physically bigger).
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    Maybe the charger charges differently and with a larger safety margin at 100%[1] when it detects a non-EOM battery? [1] 100% doesn't mean that the battery is fully charged, it means that the detected level is what the charger is prepared to go to. To conserve battery life it is not uncommon to have a 100% indicator when the battery is only 90% charged, and a 10% indicator when the battery is only 20% charged.
massysett 5y ago
"not sure this kind of consistent incremental upgrade work is attractive enough to volunteer FOSS developers." It can't be possibly be attractive enough to compete with the billions of dollars that Apple can spend on this. The company has nearly $200 billion in cash sitting around. FOSS just can't compete with what Apple can invest on hardware development.
j1elo 5y ago
I hope he posts an update saying that the battery charge was a mistake and it had been at 49% not 99%. Otherwise, not even reaching 12 mere hours of battery life is... let's leave it at underwhelming
- kop316 5y ago
  No, that is likely not a mistake. The battery life on my Librem 5 is ~8 hours for me on standby with the Modem/Wifi on, I can probably get a bit longer without wifi on. With moderate usage, I would say it drops to ~5-6 hours? But I haven't done any rigorous testing to tell you exact numbers. Since I am usually either at home or at work, it isn't far away from a charger so battery life isn't a huge deal for me.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    This is pretty awful if true. I've been through a fair number of mid-priced android phones (I'm more of a buy what's good enough and replace every couple of years for fun guy than a flagship phone guy), and I don't recall /any/ of them lasting for less than ~24 hrs on mostly standby/light usage. Obviously battery life drops a fair bit if you play a bunch of games or stream video or whatever though.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Is that really that surprising? Android is heavily modified OS, with plenty of engineer hours poured into it, hell, even the kernel is patched to better fit its niche.
      - p1necone 5y ago
        My surpise isn't directed at Android, it's at Purism for releasing a product with such poor battery life.
  - linmob 5y ago
    Based on my recent experience with a Librem 5, this is an accurate figure if anyone has doubts. Not doing much with the phone, just a few (like 4) photos and SMS and some light browsing of Mastodon, I can get up to 12 or 13 hours with WiFi turned off (via hardware kill switch) at best - with WiFi on I land where kop316 is. Both of these figures are way better than they were a year ago, back then I managed to get 8 to 9 hours with WiFi off. There’s work happening to make suspending the phone an option (that’s how the less efficient PinePhone, that’s equipped with a smaller battery manages to deliver better battery life).
p1necone 5y ago
I've got an Android phone that consistently lasts for 2 days before needing a charge (Motorola Edge 20 Fusion if you're curious), so it's not limited to Apple. Although Motorola smartphones have been pretty solid for a while now, so not discounting that there has probably been a lot of R&D effort invested on their end too.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  For the record, the Librem 5 has a 4500mAh battery (although the battery is rated at 4.35V while the phone uses only up to 4.2V, so the actual usable capacity is a bit lower).
  - p1necone 5y ago
    Ah, I googled 'librem 5 battery life' and trusted a random review which said 3500 (https://www.techradar.com/reviews/librem-5 https://www.techradar.com/reviews/librem-5) - probably should have found the official product page instead which very clearly says 4500 (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/). Deleted that part of my comment.
    - seba_dos1 5y ago
      To be fair, this was kind of a last minute upgrade; initial specs had 3500mAh indeed :)
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I thought almost any new phone - with GPS/bluetooth off - will last several days. My Nokia was getting 8 days before I started putting all the apps on it. The more apps I added, the worse it got. Nowadays I generally restrict apps from running anything in the background/sync'ing etc etc if I can. I am happy to wait a few seconds for email to sync when I open the app rather than have my phone beep at me for every new email...
  - izacus 5y ago
dymk 5y ago
When I worked at Apple, every day the topic of "What new knobs can we give to the battery life optimization team?" would come up
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Yes that’s what I mean about coordination, every team is prioritizing this and coordinating with the battery life optimization team. The aggregate effect is essentially an army of engineers all working to optimize battery life. That’s difficult to compete with, probably even for Android who doesn’t fully control its hardware like Apple does. It sounds like Librem and Pine, if they haven’t already, should do the same and create a battery life optimization team, responsible for coordinating that effort across hardware, software, internal teams, and external volunteers.
tored 5y ago
Reading the Librem app docs it seems like apps are GNOME programs packaged with an manifest. I can’t find anything about app lifecycle. To be able to conserve battery apps works differently than programs, apps can be suspended. That is usually the problem with normal programs, they are not developed with battery conservation in mind. I wonder how Librem have solved this, perhaps in their scheduler, or intends to solve this in the future. https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Guides/Design/Constraints.html#low-processing-power https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Guides/Design/Constra...
- etbe 5y ago
  All programs on the Librem5 appear to be in Debian packages and most of them seem to be identical to the ones in Debian. The document you cited has procedures for getting packages in PureOS independently of Debian, but it seems that most of it will be stock Debian. For my development it seems easier to just upload to Debian and wait for the next Debian release for it to be officially part of PureOS, I'll setup my own apt repository for the things I do and publish the URL for anyone who's interested. As for apps being suspended, most apps are suspended when there's nothing to do. If a graphical application is minimised so it doesn't have to redraw the screen then it should either be doing nothing or occasionally polling a server if that's it's design. Web browsers are an interesting corner case as web sites often have JavaScript that wants to run all the time and there's some trade-off between doing what the web site wants and saving CPU/energy. But that's probably not going to be an OS issue for PureOS but an Epiphany browser issue.
  - tored 5y ago
    Don't you need hooks on the application level so the app can handle the lifecycle to avoid polling? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_environment/managing_your_app_s_life_cycle https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_envi... https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/activity-lifecycle https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/ac... I'm not an app expert nor an expert on GNOME development either, but I got a bit sceptical when I read their app example code, python with GNOME, neither is famous for being snappy.
Bellamy 5y ago
Maybe the battery gets better after a few recharges? In the case if my fairly new laptop battery they said it "adjusts" and gets better after a while. I'm not sure if it's true and how much better it actually gets. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2128704/do-new-batteries-get-better-after-a-few-charge-cycles https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2128704/do-new-batt...
wiz21c 5y ago
Maybe experienced engineers could help by providing a set of guidelines for writing drivers, applications in a battery-friendly way so that the rest can start what free/open source does all the time : long, grunt work...
- rwmj 5y ago
  powertop is probably the tool you're looking for. Agreed though that finding and fixing all the programs which needlessly poll is very tedious grunt work, and work that often goes regresses over time.
squarefoot 5y ago
> Battery life is an area that may be difficult for smaller phone makers to compete on. It would become very easy if they realized that a lot of users who buy a Linux phone would probably be happy to trade thinness for battery life.
- etbe 5y ago
  The Librem5 is twice as thick as any other phone I have owned in the last 10 years. In general I agree that thicker and heavier phones would be good but in this case they seem to have already got to the upper limits of what's considered acceptable nowadays.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Very much agreed. The same is true for Laptops, by the way; I don’t nearly care as much about thinness as battery life / CPU speed. I’d even go as far as saying that even with Apple’s efficiency and all, I’d still prefer it if they had bigger batteries.
- AnonCoward4 5y ago
  You could double the battery size and still only have one day of light to medium usage. Battery optimization especially in idle is important.
  - TheNewAndy 5y ago
    Have you seen how thick the librem 5 is? I think it is think because of the two m.2 slots in it, but I don't think you would want it any thicker.
    - etbe 5y ago
      It is thick for many reasons, having separate chips for security means a bigger motherboard, having a socket for a security chip, etc. But the battery is really big, much bigger than is common for modern phones.
- prox 5y ago
jorvi 5y ago
I honestly think that getting 85% of the way there (basically where Android is) is very possible with concerted effort. A nice by-effect will be that whatever tricks come out of the bag will almost equally be viable to boost the battery life on laptops.
captainmuon 5y ago
It depends. I think one or two dedicated engineers could spend some time and make a huge improvement. I worked on an embedded system with an Allwinner chipset. We tried to reduce power consumption, not to save battery since it was a cabled system, but to reduce heat. It turns out nobody, not Allwinner who provided the BSP, not the board designer, nor the final customer who developed the application software cared to optimize the OS much. The CPU had four cores, but only one was occupied most of the time. But all cores were at 100% frequency. Configurable voltages were also all on the upper edge. I enabled frequency scaling, switched to the correct scheduler, and now the board was much cooler and ran with more than twice the performance. I'm always surprized how many low-hanging fruit there are in these kind of systems.
- stuaxo 5y ago
  Can attest to this in almost any field of optimisation, whether for power or other resource usage like space/memory/cpu.
Hackbraten 5y ago
I don’t think they’re going to be able to improve battery life for much. Not even with lots of FOSS developers throwing hours at it. I’ve read somewhere recently that in order to keep the phone mostly free of proprietary firmware, Purism had no choice but pick lots of discrete components. That would be in contrast to most other smartphone designs with more closely integrated chipsets, they wrote. That discrete-ness, according to the author, is likely to be an upper bound for battery lifetime on the Librem 5. After all, all those chips have to be powered at least part of the time, and that allegedly consumes more energy than a single package would. In other words: the Librem 5 may never gain a decent battery lifetime. As drivers mature, battery usage may improve a little. But not much. Buyers may want to keep their hopes realistic.
- fsflover 5y ago
  You are right about the lots of discrete components, but you are wrong about the battery life. Currently, Librem 5 works for ~10 hours and it has no suspend at all. One could probably expect 24 hours when suspend is fully implemented. More details: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#21-how-long-will-be-the-battery-life-of-the-librem-5-evergreen https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
- blihp 5y ago
  You underestimate how much other low hanging fruit there is. Yes, at some point using less integrated hardware (due to driver issues) will dominate but we are pretty far from that being the limiting factor.
- rollcat 5y ago
  > I’ve read somewhere recently that in order to keep the phone mostly free of proprietary firmware, Purism had no choice but pick lots of discrete components. This is only a half the story. The Purism still runs on proprietary firmware. The discrete components in question are an actual full auxiliary CPU core, its only purpose being to load the hard-coded blob to properly boot the primary SoC. This was done because under FSF's definition, if the end user cannot update the firmware blob, then the firmware is considered one with the hardware, and the hardware as a whole is "free enough". So they took away the user's ability to update the firmware, fused it in a ROM with every possible bug and inefficiency frozen in place for the rest of eternity, wasted silicon and engineering time to do so, only to grant themselves an arbitrary, honorary badge. This isn't even radicalism anymore, this is hypocrisy. As a power-user who values freedom, and a long-time Free Software sympathiser, I am personally offended, and won't give my money to either party until they reverse course on their user-hostility.
mike-cardwell 5y ago
I'm willing to make a lot of sacrifices for a phone like this, but I'm not willing to sacrifice charging my phone whilst I sleep and then being confident it will work all day. This could be the greatest phone ever made, but if it doesn't last a full day, it's worse than every other phone I've owned, or will own.

rapind 5y ago

I'd love an e-ink phone. That would go a long way towards solving battery issues.

seba_dos1 5y ago
Usually, battery issues with hardware like that are more about idle time and reaching deep sleep states than active usage time with screen on. The latter is quite reasonable on the Librem 5, the former could be improved.
- p1necone 5y ago
  An e-ink display would allow for an always on clock though, which would be pretty sweet.
  - coder543 5y ago
    Plenty of Android phones already do this. The Pixel 4a 5G is an example of one, and the always on clock / information screen drains very little battery, while still being really nice. It is baffling to me that Apple still hasn't implemented this feature even on their top end "Pro" iPhones... but this feature by itself isn't enough for me to switch to Android full time.
    - callalex 5y ago
      The feature is not implemented on iPhones so that you are more incentivized to buy their smartwatch.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    Oled screen allows only the pixels required to be lit up. So a 50% brightness thin line clock on Oled androids is pretty common. Not months worth of battery saving like an eInk screen maybe but still enough to be insignificant compared to general "screen off" battery consumption.
  - mackrevinack 5y ago
    seeing as the phone is a chonker, you could maybe fit a thin screen on the top side of the phone, which would let you see some basic info without having to take the phone out of your pocket. (as long as the headphone jack was at the bottom and the power button on the side)
razemio 5y ago
Hisense A7 or Yota 3 should be your choice then. Both e-ink phones. Yota with the twist that you have the choice to use e-ink or a normal screen by turning the phone.
- account-5 5y ago
  I would love an eink based mobile. Can't find anywhere selling the ones you've named in my country though. Back to hoping they'll become more common.
shp0ngle 5y ago
There are e-ink phones. They don't run regular Android though, with Google Play, just the open source version with some Chinese marketplace. I have followed one (now dead) e-ink phone on indiegogo (forgot the name, sorry), and they wrote that Google does not let (black-and-white) e-ink smartphones pass Android certification, because they cannot correctly display the colors in their apps. So they will never run Google Play, and there will never be just e-ink phone with built-in regular Android and Google Play, sadly. There is a hacky way to get Google Play on the hisense phones, but... ugh. That's too much hackiness for me.

yeetsfromhell 5y ago

Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. Linux on a laptop gets similar battery life to Windows in my experience, and that's without using kernel patches and crazy settings, etc.

xvector 5y ago
Android phones have terrible battery efficiency compared to iPhones. The only reason you don't notice is because manufacturers cram in massive batteries to compensate. Same with Linux/Windows versus Macs. It is only recently that Linux/Windows laptops have begun to approach Macs in terms of battery life, and their battery efficiency is still far behind, especially with Apple Silicon being a thing.
- tenuousemphasis 5y ago
  Got some of that data?
  - jcheng 5y ago
    https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series-screen-power-battery-life-report-long-lasting-devices https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series... Platform Model Life Size Efficiency iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max 21.7 4352 4.98 iOS Apple iPhone 13 16.8 3227 5.21 iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro 16.6 3095 5.37 Android ASUS ROG Phone 5 16.6 6000 2.77 Android ASUS ROG Phone III 16.5 6000 2.75 Android ASUS ROG Phone II 16.2 6000 2.7 Android Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (S888) 15.9 5000 3.18 iOS Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max 15.6 3969 3.93 (Efficiency is just Life / Size * 1000)
    - unobatbayar 5y ago
      Never thought iPhone 13 has bigger battery than iPhone 13 Pro. It's almost as if they deliberately added this seemingly bad option so people would choose the most expensive option iPhone 13 Pro Max. Because it would seem like the best deal out of three. I mean the Pro Max is just $100 more expensive than Pro, right? But remove this decoy option, and most people would just buy the iPhone 13.

wrycoder 5y ago

I’ve personally replaced several iPhone batteries. The aftermarket ones don’t seem to last as long as the Apple OEM ones do.

ge96 5y ago
That annoys me so much, only downside of buying used stuff (to me), fake replacement battery specs.
p1necone 5y ago
I remember replacement PSP batteries being similar. It was basically impossible to find third party batteries that were as good as OEM ones, even the ones that advertised higher mah numbers than the stock Sony ones were awful (despite even being physically bigger).
- lelanthran 5y ago
  Maybe the charger charges differently and with a larger safety margin at 100%[1] when it detects a non-EOM battery? [1] 100% doesn't mean that the battery is fully charged, it means that the detected level is what the charger is prepared to go to. To conserve battery life it is not uncommon to have a 100% indicator when the battery is only 90% charged, and a 10% indicator when the battery is only 20% charged.

massysett 5y ago

"not sure this kind of consistent incremental upgrade work is attractive enough to volunteer FOSS developers." It can't be possibly be attractive enough to compete with the billions of dollars that Apple can spend on this. The company has nearly $200 billion in cash sitting around. FOSS just can't compete with what Apple can invest on hardware development.

j1elo 5y ago

I hope he posts an update saying that the battery charge was a mistake and it had been at 49% not 99%. Otherwise, not even reaching 12 mere hours of battery life is... let's leave it at underwhelming

kop316 5y ago
No, that is likely not a mistake. The battery life on my Librem 5 is ~8 hours for me on standby with the Modem/Wifi on, I can probably get a bit longer without wifi on. With moderate usage, I would say it drops to ~5-6 hours? But I haven't done any rigorous testing to tell you exact numbers. Since I am usually either at home or at work, it isn't far away from a charger so battery life isn't a huge deal for me.
- p1necone 5y ago
  This is pretty awful if true. I've been through a fair number of mid-priced android phones (I'm more of a buy what's good enough and replace every couple of years for fun guy than a flagship phone guy), and I don't recall /any/ of them lasting for less than ~24 hrs on mostly standby/light usage. Obviously battery life drops a fair bit if you play a bunch of games or stream video or whatever though.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Is that really that surprising? Android is heavily modified OS, with plenty of engineer hours poured into it, hell, even the kernel is patched to better fit its niche.
    - p1necone 5y ago
      My surpise isn't directed at Android, it's at Purism for releasing a product with such poor battery life.
- linmob 5y ago
  Based on my recent experience with a Librem 5, this is an accurate figure if anyone has doubts. Not doing much with the phone, just a few (like 4) photos and SMS and some light browsing of Mastodon, I can get up to 12 or 13 hours with WiFi turned off (via hardware kill switch) at best - with WiFi on I land where kop316 is. Both of these figures are way better than they were a year ago, back then I managed to get 8 to 9 hours with WiFi off. There’s work happening to make suspending the phone an option (that’s how the less efficient PinePhone, that’s equipped with a smaller battery manages to deliver better battery life).

p1necone 5y ago

I've got an Android phone that consistently lasts for 2 days before needing a charge (Motorola Edge 20 Fusion if you're curious), so it's not limited to Apple. Although Motorola smartphones have been pretty solid for a while now, so not discounting that there has probably been a lot of R&D effort invested on their end too.

seba_dos1 5y ago
For the record, the Librem 5 has a 4500mAh battery (although the battery is rated at 4.35V while the phone uses only up to 4.2V, so the actual usable capacity is a bit lower).
- p1necone 5y ago
  Ah, I googled 'librem 5 battery life' and trusted a random review which said 3500 (https://www.techradar.com/reviews/librem-5 https://www.techradar.com/reviews/librem-5) - probably should have found the official product page instead which very clearly says 4500 (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/). Deleted that part of my comment.
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    To be fair, this was kind of a last minute upgrade; initial specs had 3500mAh indeed :)
_carbyau_ 5y ago
I thought almost any new phone - with GPS/bluetooth off - will last several days. My Nokia was getting 8 days before I started putting all the apps on it. The more apps I added, the worse it got. Nowadays I generally restrict apps from running anything in the background/sync'ing etc etc if I can. I am happy to wait a few seconds for email to sync when I open the app rather than have my phone beep at me for every new email...
- izacus 5y ago

dymk 5y ago

When I worked at Apple, every day the topic of "What new knobs can we give to the battery life optimization team?" would come up

SkyMarshal 5y ago
Yes that’s what I mean about coordination, every team is prioritizing this and coordinating with the battery life optimization team. The aggregate effect is essentially an army of engineers all working to optimize battery life. That’s difficult to compete with, probably even for Android who doesn’t fully control its hardware like Apple does. It sounds like Librem and Pine, if they haven’t already, should do the same and create a battery life optimization team, responsible for coordinating that effort across hardware, software, internal teams, and external volunteers.

tored 5y ago

Reading the Librem app docs it seems like apps are GNOME programs packaged with an manifest. I can’t find anything about app lifecycle. To be able to conserve battery apps works differently than programs, apps can be suspended. That is usually the problem with normal programs, they are not developed with battery conservation in mind. I wonder how Librem have solved this, perhaps in their scheduler, or intends to solve this in the future. https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Guides/Design/Constraints.html#low-processing-power https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Guides/Design/Constra...

etbe 5y ago
All programs on the Librem5 appear to be in Debian packages and most of them seem to be identical to the ones in Debian. The document you cited has procedures for getting packages in PureOS independently of Debian, but it seems that most of it will be stock Debian. For my development it seems easier to just upload to Debian and wait for the next Debian release for it to be officially part of PureOS, I'll setup my own apt repository for the things I do and publish the URL for anyone who's interested. As for apps being suspended, most apps are suspended when there's nothing to do. If a graphical application is minimised so it doesn't have to redraw the screen then it should either be doing nothing or occasionally polling a server if that's it's design. Web browsers are an interesting corner case as web sites often have JavaScript that wants to run all the time and there's some trade-off between doing what the web site wants and saving CPU/energy. But that's probably not going to be an OS issue for PureOS but an Epiphany browser issue.
- tored 5y ago
  Don't you need hooks on the application level so the app can handle the lifecycle to avoid polling? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_environment/managing_your_app_s_life_cycle https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_envi... https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/activity-lifecycle https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/ac... I'm not an app expert nor an expert on GNOME development either, but I got a bit sceptical when I read their app example code, python with GNOME, neither is famous for being snappy.

Bellamy 5y ago

Maybe the battery gets better after a few recharges? In the case if my fairly new laptop battery they said it "adjusts" and gets better after a while. I'm not sure if it's true and how much better it actually gets. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2128704/do-new-batteries-get-better-after-a-few-charge-cycles https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2128704/do-new-batt...

wiz21c 5y ago

Maybe experienced engineers could help by providing a set of guidelines for writing drivers, applications in a battery-friendly way so that the rest can start what free/open source does all the time : long, grunt work...

rwmj 5y ago
powertop is probably the tool you're looking for. Agreed though that finding and fixing all the programs which needlessly poll is very tedious grunt work, and work that often goes regresses over time.

squarefoot 5y ago

> Battery life is an area that may be difficult for smaller phone makers to compete on. It would become very easy if they realized that a lot of users who buy a Linux phone would probably be happy to trade thinness for battery life.

etbe 5y ago
The Librem5 is twice as thick as any other phone I have owned in the last 10 years. In general I agree that thicker and heavier phones would be good but in this case they seem to have already got to the upper limits of what's considered acceptable nowadays.
stingraycharles 5y ago
Very much agreed. The same is true for Laptops, by the way; I don’t nearly care as much about thinness as battery life / CPU speed. I’d even go as far as saying that even with Apple’s efficiency and all, I’d still prefer it if they had bigger batteries.
AnonCoward4 5y ago
You could double the battery size and still only have one day of light to medium usage. Battery optimization especially in idle is important.
- TheNewAndy 5y ago
  Have you seen how thick the librem 5 is? I think it is think because of the two m.2 slots in it, but I don't think you would want it any thicker.
  - etbe 5y ago
    It is thick for many reasons, having separate chips for security means a bigger motherboard, having a socket for a security chip, etc. But the battery is really big, much bigger than is common for modern phones.
prox 5y ago

jorvi 5y ago

I honestly think that getting 85% of the way there (basically where Android is) is very possible with concerted effort. A nice by-effect will be that whatever tricks come out of the bag will almost equally be viable to boost the battery life on laptops.

captainmuon 5y ago

It depends. I think one or two dedicated engineers could spend some time and make a huge improvement. I worked on an embedded system with an Allwinner chipset. We tried to reduce power consumption, not to save battery since it was a cabled system, but to reduce heat. It turns out nobody, not Allwinner who provided the BSP, not the board designer, nor the final customer who developed the application software cared to optimize the OS much. The CPU had four cores, but only one was occupied most of the time. But all cores were at 100% frequency. Configurable voltages were also all on the upper edge. I enabled frequency scaling, switched to the correct scheduler, and now the board was much cooler and ran with more than twice the performance. I'm always surprized how many low-hanging fruit there are in these kind of systems.

stuaxo 5y ago
Can attest to this in almost any field of optimisation, whether for power or other resource usage like space/memory/cpu.

Hackbraten 5y ago

I don’t think they’re going to be able to improve battery life for much. Not even with lots of FOSS developers throwing hours at it. I’ve read somewhere recently that in order to keep the phone mostly free of proprietary firmware, Purism had no choice but pick lots of discrete components. That would be in contrast to most other smartphone designs with more closely integrated chipsets, they wrote. That discrete-ness, according to the author, is likely to be an upper bound for battery lifetime on the Librem 5. After all, all those chips have to be powered at least part of the time, and that allegedly consumes more energy than a single package would. In other words: the Librem 5 may never gain a decent battery lifetime. As drivers mature, battery usage may improve a little. But not much. Buyers may want to keep their hopes realistic.

fsflover 5y ago
You are right about the lots of discrete components, but you are wrong about the battery life. Currently, Librem 5 works for ~10 hours and it has no suspend at all. One could probably expect 24 hours when suspend is fully implemented. More details: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#21-how-long-will-be-the-battery-life-of-the-librem-5-evergreen https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
blihp 5y ago
You underestimate how much other low hanging fruit there is. Yes, at some point using less integrated hardware (due to driver issues) will dominate but we are pretty far from that being the limiting factor.
rollcat 5y ago
> I’ve read somewhere recently that in order to keep the phone mostly free of proprietary firmware, Purism had no choice but pick lots of discrete components. This is only a half the story. The Purism still runs on proprietary firmware. The discrete components in question are an actual full auxiliary CPU core, its only purpose being to load the hard-coded blob to properly boot the primary SoC. This was done because under FSF's definition, if the end user cannot update the firmware blob, then the firmware is considered one with the hardware, and the hardware as a whole is "free enough". So they took away the user's ability to update the firmware, fused it in a ROM with every possible bug and inefficiency frozen in place for the rest of eternity, wasted silicon and engineering time to do so, only to grant themselves an arbitrary, honorary badge. This isn't even radicalism anymore, this is hypocrisy. As a power-user who values freedom, and a long-time Free Software sympathiser, I am personally offended, and won't give my money to either party until they reverse course on their user-hostility.

mike-cardwell 5y ago

I'm willing to make a lot of sacrifices for a phone like this, but I'm not willing to sacrifice charging my phone whilst I sleep and then being confident it will work all day. This could be the greatest phone ever made, but if it doesn't last a full day, it's worse than every other phone I've owned, or will own.