Phones still need aggressive battery management

Smartphone batteries are getting bigger and bigger. Some of Samsung’s midrange phones regularly cross the 7,000 mAh threshold. Other brands come close to this number too. However, a large battery does not always guarantee a long battery life.

Software management also plays a role. However, Samsung was recently designated by the DontKillMyApp team to aggressively root apps in the background through One UI. While this improves power consumption, it also results in missed notifications and longer app loading times for users.

With that in mind, we wanted to know from our readers whether phones really still need aggressive tactics for battery management in 2021. Here’s what you told us:

Do phones still need aggressive battery management?

Results

We asked this question on YouTube. Twitterand a survey on our website. All three platforms provided similarly weird answers.

Over 39,000 votes were cast on YouTube. 72% of respondents believe that battery management still has a place in modern phones. Twitter received over 3,600 votes. Just under 68% of the readers were on the side of the YouTube crowd.

Must read: How to Maximize Battery Life | What causes the smartphone battery to discharge?

In particular, the respondents to the website survey rated battery management less. We only saw 56% side with the rest, but a larger fraction of that crowd didn’t think aggressive battery management had a place on smartphones. If you look at the comments, some of these users also agree that battery management should be done by the user.

Here’s what you told us:

• PhoenixWitti: I prefer Samsung’s approach, which allows me to opt for battery-powered apps and processes. One of the reasons I have phenomenal battery life on my phones is because I kept restricting active apps and killing others. All types of Google tracking are disabled on my phone. Many sensors are turned off on my phone. Samsung just makes it easier for users.
• Absolutely General: It seems like it is being argued that killing background apps is no good. Why exactly? Is it better to let them run and waste battery than the few seconds or less to bring them back to life? What kind of business-critical functions are running around the world that require ALL apps to be running? all the time?
• Albin: In general, I prefer to manage the battery and background usage myself, mainly with screen control and Greenify, and to disable the automated interventions of Android and OEM.
• Steven Henriquez: I’m sure we can manage our apps ourselves.
• FAF89: You may need it, but we should be able to turn it off. People buy phones with 6GB of RAM for one reason: multitasking

That’s it for this poll. Thank you for your votes and comments. If you have any other thoughts on aggressive battery management on phones or the results of this survey, drop these below.