Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google says they’ve sped up the speed at which phones enter sleep mode by 50% in Android 15.
- The result is that some devices get up to 3 hours more standby power on the latest operating system.
- This improvement will come to all devices that receive the Android 15 update.
Every major Android update brings a few high-level, user-focused features that get a lot of marketing and attention, but it also makes a lot of low-level, under-the-hood changes that can be just as important from a user experience perspective. Take the upcoming Android 15 update as an example. At the Google I/O 2024 developer conference this week, the second beta version of Android 15 was announced with headline-grabbing features like Private Space, App Pairs, improved theft detection services and more. But during I/O, Google also quietly shared some interesting statistics about Android 15, such as that it improves standby battery life by up to three hours on some devices.
At Google I/O, I asked Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for the Android platform, and Sameet Samat, president of the Android ecosystem, to explain how Google achieved the battery life improvements they announced as part of the latest version of Wear OS. In case you missed the announcement, Google basically said that marathon running on smartwatches running Wear OS 5 consume up to 20% less power than on Wear OS 4. Samath said that this particular improvement was achieved by making various optimizations, with one example being reducing the amount of time it takes for the device’s main application processor (AP) to return to sleep mode after being woken up to write some health data. (For the full interview with Dave Burke and Samet Samat, see episode 44 of Android Faithful podcast I co-host).
Samat went on to talk about how Wear OS 5 now defers even more background tasks to when your watch is charging than it is on your wrist. Deciding when it’s best to run background tasks is a huge challenge not just for Wear OS, but for all of Android. Android tries to intelligently postpone and run as many background tasks as possible simultaneously during selected “maintenance windows” while the device is in a state where it has been inactive for a certain period of time and its screen is off. This state – called sleep mode – has been a core feature of Android’s power management system since Android 6.0 and sees further improvements in Android 15, according to Dave Burke.
Burke followed up on Samat’s response by outlining some general power-saving improvements coming to all Android devices in the future. Specifically, he says that in Android 15, the company has sped up the snooze time by 50%. This means that devices running Android 15 will enter sleep mode 50% faster than in Android 14. The result is an improvement in standby battery life, up to three hours on some devices that Google is testing .
“For Android 15, we’ve sped up the snooze time (a snooze is when we go into a sleep state) by 50%. So we fall asleep 50% faster and the result is on some devices we tested up to 3 hours longer standby power. And it’s kind of a general improvement in 15 that applies to all devices.” Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for the Android platform.
As this is a change to a core Android feature, this improvement will cover all devices that receive an update to Android 15. This includes Wear OS, although it’s worth noting that the upcoming update to the Wear OS 5 platform is based on Android 14, not Android 15. Still, it’s an improvement we’re looking forward to in next year’s Wear OS 6 update, assuming Google continues its annual cycle of releasing updates to the Wear OS platform. While this specific improvement won’t appear in this year’s Wear OS 5 release, the other battery-related improvement we mentioned will, as will new features like network-based app launch and a privacy dashboard.
