Thoughts on Doze?

[Crispy]

I have mixed feelings. It pretty much shuts down the phone when its left idle, so of course it will save battery, but it seems like so much more could be done.

- only works on flat surface when left alone, i..e when sleeping or if you forget the phone. What if I have my phone in backpack, or in a flight, or a train? Exact same need there.
- it stops all notifications till you use the phone. I depend on my phone to beep and tell me something's up even when I'm home all day.
- there are much better ways to do this - periodically wake up the notif service, save battery by turning off data/gps/bt/wifi etc when its not turned on for say 5min
- throttle the cpu based on usage, move tasks to low power core, but dont shut everything off
- many custom apps and roms have implemented above features, but they need root and can't do as much as the OS can
- M does nothing to address the problem of wakelocks. If you have one and Doze is not activated (e.g. normal work day) then wakelocks will still drain battery. This is one of the biggest issues in Android

 

[jdhooghe]

I don't understand why Google doesn't smack some sense into App developers. Why is it so difficult to create an app that behaves the way you select from the settings? If I don't give it permission to work in the background then it damn well shouldn't.

Google get your **** together.
/endrant

Sorry but these wake locks are annoying and coming from iOS it is embarrassing. You can always try the app Doze to see if it works better for you.

 

[LeoRex]

Doze's functionality is new. Google made a compromise in an attempt to address all the pros and cons of the Doze feature without reducing the functionality of the phone. If the phone is sitting on a table, idle, for the amount of time Doze needs to trigger (about an hour), Google makes an assumption that you aren't using it at the moment.... so they fire of Doze. If it runs all the time, the speed which you get emails, updates on whatever social media you might be using... things like getting location specific Google Now cards, those all would suffer since they would get supressed. Doing so would mean that you would actively have to go in and excempt an app from being controlled by Doze... but that pretty much defeats the purpose.... It won't take too many exemptions before Doze ceases to have any benefit.

I have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. Battery usage has been my own white whale, of sorts, since the first time I woke up to find a dead phone on my nightstand some three years ago. I've used a countless number tools designed to save battery life.... from snake oil apps 'Battery Saver' apps to things like Amplify, Greenify, etc...constant fussing with custom kernels and tools baked into custom ROMs, to homebrewed, highly complicated solutions written in automation apps like Tasker and Llama. You name it, I've tried it. When Doze is active, it is more effective than any other method I've used.... well, short of putting it in Airplane Mode when I turn the screen off (my own super power save mode). When it settles down, I see idle drains as low as 0.2% an hour overnight, pretty much the only thing drawing power is the radios and the SoC in its lowest power state. I wouldn't want it to fire when I'm out and about... or sitting on the seat of my car as I am on my commute.... that'd put the ol' damper on the goody location aware bits that I use quite often.

Keep in mind that this is the first version.... There will be adjustments, tweaks, maybe even some user-facing options to tweak.