Background Tasks

[Jason Drum]

Can someone explain or help me understand background tasks, what they do, why they're necessary. I'm not a moron, I know it's that apps can continue to do things despite not being open, but what are they doing or how necessary is it?

Unplugged, overnight, I lose about 20% battery doing nothing. NFC and Bluetooth are turned off. My wireless and data connections are good. So I'm assuming it's because of my Background Tasks running that I lose the battery.

Do you have to have background tasks enabled for a live tile to work? The live tiles I have are NBC News, Amazing Weather HD, Weather Radar Tile, BBC News, WPCentral, ESPN, MyStocks, and Facebook. Those are the background tasks allowed to run, plus Paper Shuffle and Battery (Semenov). If I have to turn off those live tiles to save my battery, that sort of defeats the whole purpose of me going to Windows Phone.

Any help?

 

[WorzelGummage]

Your assumptions are correct. Live tiles will automatically update every 30 minutes providing that you have an active data connection which in turn will use battery. You mention that you have 3G data left on overnight as well as WiFi but leaving both of these on will drain the battery. I always turn 3G off when at home and only use WiFi otherwise my battery wouldn't last as long as it does. I also put my phone in to flight mode overnight and it doesn't lose any battery at all during this period.

 

[Jason Drum]

I realize that I could turn those things off, but I guarantee that if I try to make that my routine, it will last 2 days. It would be nice if an app could automatically change these things based on time of day. I'd like to automatically change from ring to vibrate and vice versa because of work. But I understand those things are impossible. I guess I'll just deal with it.

 

[WorzelGummage]

Yes, timed profile switching would be a most welcome feature. Who knows, but perhaps Nokia are working on this very thing for Lumia phones just like we had in Symbian.

 

[cw1988]

I generally put my phone on airplane mode when in going to sleep so i get no notifications at all and i also turn WiFi and data off. Since i have started doing this my battery lasts for alot longer. Although i really just do it now so my phone doesn't beep all night because it gets charged over night.

 

[hopmedic]

Check out this post - it will give you a much greater understanding of how the phone manages the background.
http://forums.windowscentral.com/wi...naging-background-apps-why-you-dont-need.html

 

[Jason Drum]

I've read that before and it's very well put together with a ton of information. I don't think or complain that the phone runs slow with the background apps going. My bigger concern is trying to find out what eats 20% of my battery overnight doing absolutely nothing. If it's as simple as "tough, that's how it is" then I guess I'll just live with it and keep an eye on the battery and charge if I need. But I see other people say that overnight they only lose 1% battery. Was wondering if the background tasks are my culprit.

 

[Martsicky]

I've read that before and it's very well put together with a ton of information. I don't think or complain that the phone runs slow with the background apps going. My bigger concern is trying to find out what eats 20% of my battery overnight doing absolutely nothing. If it's as simple as "tough, that's how it is" then I guess I'll just live with it and keep an eye on the battery and charge if I need. But I see other people say that overnight they only lose 1% battery. Was wondering if the background tasks are my culprit.

Hi Jason. Many of Windows Phone users are reporting significant battery percentage losses during night. Personally my Lumia consumes about 1-5% during 10 hrs of sleep, with: wi-fi, 3g, bluetooth, nfc switched off + about 6 live tiles and localization services on. Few times my battery dropped about 20% and one time I left it with 40% and found it completely discharged.. Then I noticed it happens often when I use my phone a lot (6-7hrs) during the day to watch movies, listen to music and internet browsing. I suggest you to make a reboot before going to sleep if you had used your phone a lot. It works for me.

 

[hopmedic]

I've read that before and it's very well put together with a ton of information. I don't think or complain that the phone runs slow with the background apps going. My bigger concern is trying to find out what eats 20% of my battery overnight doing absolutely nothing. If it's as simple as "tough, that's how it is" then I guess I'll just live with it and keep an eye on the battery and charge if I need. But I see other people say that overnight they only lose 1% battery. Was wondering if the background tasks are my culprit.

I agree with those who say it would be nice if there were a way to track what app is using the battery. It would definitely help with scenarios like yours, and being able to find what the problem is. As has been pointed out (don't remember if it was here or elsewhere) a background task that uses the entire 25 seconds that it is allowed, will use more than 20 minutes of processing time in the course of a 24 hour day. Multiply that by up to 15 (the most I've seen - could be more, I don't know), and you've got a lot of processor time - five hours! The saving grace is that most apps with background tasks don't require more than a few seconds. The problem is figuring out which ones are the culprits.

One trick I've used (if it is available to you) is to look in the Data Sense app and see which apps are using the most data. Some of those will be obvious to you, as you may be taking lots of photos, and sending them out, so they'll obviously use more. Or I use Podcatcher, so it downloads podcasts and therefore uses a lot of wifi. But evaluating the ones that use a lot of data can help to figure out which are using lots of battery. Obviously this isn't a perfect scenario, because a game, for instance, if it is running, is using a lot of processor but probably not much data if any at all. But it's one tool that can help to narrow things down.

Maybe one day MS will add an app that tells what apps use the most power. One thing that leads me to hope this is that the latest version of Visual Studio, the programming environment that we use to develop apps, has a new feature that a developer can use to profile his app, including how much power the app uses, and even graphs it over time (as long as he is running the profiler). I have to hope that if they're giving developers that tool, that not only will apps use less power (providing that devs use the tool - there will always be sloppy devs), but also that they are working on a similar tool for users.

Hope this helps.

 

[cw1988]

Just to add, maybe devs could make a dedicated app using the apps power usage options so users could track this themselves, power usage for each app.

 

[hopmedic]

I haven't used it yet, but the way it looks to me is that it's not something you put into the app. It's part of the development environment, which runs a test while you run the app in the emulator, during testing.

 

[cw1988]

I haven't used it yet, but the way it looks to me is that it's not something you put into the app. It's part of the development environment, which runs a test while you run the app in the emulator, during testing.

ah ok, well then hopefully this new test will be used by alot of devs.

I wonder if there would be a way to check for power usage "in app" it would be awesome to know(maybe not for everyone) but i always like to know little details like this.

 

[Jason Drum]

One trick I've used (if it is available to you) is to look in the Data Sense app and see which apps are using the most data.

One thing that leads me to hope this is that the latest version of Visual Studio, the programming environment that we use to develop apps, has a new feature that a developer can use to profile his app, including how much power the app uses, and even graphs it over time (as long as he is running the profiler).

I'll dig into Data Sense and see if it helps, thanks. And that is really cool to have that option as a developer. Hopefully developers would care enough to be using that feature.