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Energy, WiFi and RAM use by Android messaging apps
- andrey_utkin 3y agoHi! I would like to show you my small analysis of Android messaging apps: power draw, bandwidth and RAM use.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoWhy did you not include Signal?
- SushiHippie 3y agoWas element (not the X version) using google play services for notifications or did you download it from F-Droid?
- Ylpertnodi 3y agoSignal?
- izacus 3y agoI scrolled through the document and I don't see any measurements of the number of received messages - that will pretty much dominate the standby power draw of any messaging app (rule of thumb is - 1s of modem/CPU wakeup takes away 1min of standby time). So the data can be seriously meaningless if you don't control for the amount of messages received and their interval (spread out messages hit the power draw more than batched - phones usually race to idle).
- g-b-r 3y agoNot surprised in the least about Element unfortunately, it really screamed for a rewrite (one of the biggest problems was the horrible choice of database, which unfortunately was very hard to replace)
- nyanpasu64 3y agoWhat was the poor choice of database on Element (Android or Electron), and how does it increase power usage?
- trogdor3000 3y agoSounds like the old Element app that was being used was using an always on notification to poll for push notifications instead of using a push service. Element X only supports FCM cloud push notifications right now I think
- tcfhgj 3y agoI think it used push on play store and polling on f-droid
- joecool1029 3y agoCorrect, the novel thing Element X does different is sliding sync which allows for much faster partial syncs when the app is opened. The classic apps would have to do a much more substantial (and energy intensive) sync each time it was brought up to foreground. The big drawback are the X versions are still very far from feature complete.
- g-b-r 3y agoIt can use (and I think it's the default) UnifiedPush on F-Droid
- edsimpson 3y agoThis really interesting, would love to see how Signal stacks up.
- MBCook 3y agoCan someone summarize the findings? I genuinely can’t read it well. The tables are too wide for the viewport. If I make the browser wider the page becomes two columns and the viewports are still too small to show the full table. The sections of text also appear to be longer than the boxes they are in, causing scrolling inside which I only discovered after a few minutes and making it hard to read. Honestly it’s quite frustrating. Which is too bad I really liked that this testing was done.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoYeah this 2-column layout is super weird. > Conversations (XMPP) seems best for battery life, traffic and RAM. > Facebook Messenger and Element (Matrix) are the worst from the studied apps, draining up to 300x more power than Conversations when battery optimization is disabled. Keep battery optimization enabled for them, I guess. Need more data to see better. > Element X (experimental Matrix app) is coming up with a more than 100x reduction in energy consumption (comparing to Element), drawing just 2x more power than Conversations.
- tentacleuno 3y agoNot surprised they've found Element to be so inefficient. It used to drain a LOT of my battery, despite me never actually using it. I find myself disappointed with Element apps in general (it's why I use Nheko Reborn on desktop).
- tcfhgj 3y agoI guess it's time to uninstall Element. Have been running it alongside Element X so far, but the energy consumption does not justify the few additional features
- senectus1 3y agothe conclusion isn't good enough? Conclusions Conversations (XMPP) seems best for battery life, traffic and RAM. Facebook Messenger and Element (Matrix) are the worst from the studied apps, draining up to 300x more power than Conversations when battery optimization is disabled. Keep battery optimization enabled for them, I guess. Need more data to see better. Element X (experimental Matrix app) is coming up with a more than 100x reduction in energy consumption (comparing to Element), drawing just 2x more power than Conversations. A few more proprietary messengers have been measured and they fall in between the space between the above mentioned extremes. Little can be said about them besides that most of them continuously draw substantial amount of power and bandwidth even when not interacted with.
- siddheshgunjal 3y agoIt's a good thing that I have disabled Gmail app on my device and use k9 for all my email accounts. Seems like I should stop using WhatsApp too.
- Grimburger 3y agoK9 is great and has worked well for me for years, very impressed with its numbers here.
- ommz 3y agoTangent, I find Instagram to be one of the most egregious battery drainers amongst mainstream apps. A former IG employee made a claim here on HN that the inefficiency was due to ghastly experiments being run on clients devices. Shame, I cannot seem to find that comment.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mikelward 3y agoAccording to Battery Historian [1], WhatsApp was the single biggest cause of battery drain on my phone. 1. https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/power/battery-historian https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/power/batter...
- WithinReason 3y agoSeems like measuring the median would be misleading