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Standby Apps to Save Battery on your Android Smartphones

Standby Apps to Save Battery on your Android Smartphones

Android 9 was released in the month of August in 2018 which bought the users several new promising features. Among them, the one feature that really stood out amongst the users was the Standby Apps feature.

Standby Apps feature is an Apps Standby Bucket power management tool that directly limits the application’s usage of resources like CPU, RAM, etc. in the phone to boost the battery life and overall performance of the android phone.

How does Standby Apps work?

Standby Apps have been categorized into the following categories:

Active:
The application that is currently being used or that is actively used or that is actively running on the foreground on the phone is categorized as an Active group. There are not any kind of restrictions placed on this category.

Working Set:
The applications that the users often run but are not currently active are
categorized as Working Set applications. An example of this could be any social media application that the user often uses but are not currently open or active. Only mild restrictions are applied, and the limitations are low.

Frequent:
The applications that are used frequently but not every day are categorized in Frequent applications. An example of this could be mobile games or mobile banking applications. The applications under this category have stronger restrictions and limitations on their ability to run jobs and trigger alarms. And, also imposes a cap on high priority Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) messages.

Rare:
The applications that are rarely used by users such as movie ticket booking applications, hotel booking applications, data transferring applications, etc. An application under this category has strict restrictions and limitations on its ability to run jobs and trigger alarms. And, also imposes a cap on high priority Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) messages. The system also imposes strict limitations on the application’s ability to use the internet.

Never/Exempted:
Applications such as Google, Google Services, Google Assistant, etc. the user may not use very often but are essential for the phone are exempted from this feature. Also, applications that the user may have installed or may have come built-in but never used are imposed with very strict restrictions unless they are exempted from the feature.

Can the Standby applications be manually set-up by the user?

Yes!
Android has allowed the users to manually set up and categorize the applications.To manually categorized the applications, one will need to dig deep into the phone settings in the Developer Options menu.
If you do not know how to get into developer options, go to Settings > About Phone.
Tap on Build Number 7 times to enable Developer Mode.
Go back to the Settings main panel and then you can see the Developer Options menu.
Now, inside the Developers Options menu, tap on Standby apps and manually set-up the category under which you can choose the categories of Standby apps for your applications.

So how does this feature of Standby Apps help me save my battery?

When a user switches on his/her phone, there are already several applications running in the background which the user is not aware of.

One way for the user to find out about the applications running in the background is by tapping
on Developer Options > Process Stats.
These applications constantly use your CPU and drain battery without the user’s knowledge. One might think that he/she has not used any applications, but their battery is low and thinks if it’s the fault on the battery’s condition. This may be true but mostly it occurs because of the background applications.
The Standby apps feature enables the user to restrict the amount of CPU usage. The restrictions on the applications will prevent the applications from draining battery which can directly help save battery on the mobile phone by a significant amount.

Written by – Rojen Shakya

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