Are live tiles constantly updating when phone is on standby?

[hopmedic]

Does that mean, all the apps that have Live Tiles will update the Tiles at the same time? For example if I have 10 apps, all of them will update at 9.00 p.m?

Yes, they will all update at the same time - provided there is data available for them to update. For example, if the feed that a tile uses to update has no changes from the prior update, then no, it won't change. Technically it will do an update but the updated data will be the same as the old data. As for the 9:00 statement, there is no way for you to determine when the update will happen. The OS manages when they are updated.

If they only update every 30 minutes, how can it be that it updates right away on the email or whatsapp livetile when a new message comes one?

Apps that have updates pushed to them can update as often as a push comes from the cloud. I'm not a sports fan, but I assume that some of the sports apps can push every time the score changes. That could be pretty often in something like a basketball game. Basically there is a restriction on push updates to a certain number per day, unless the developer gets a security certificate, and then updates (I think) are unlimited. I don't know all of those details as I haven't written any apps with push notifications.

 

[elmacho]

Background agents are scheduled by the phone to run when the phone will be powering up the radio, because powering up the radio is an expensive process, battery-wise.

Thanks. Informative indeed but what exactly does "powering up the radio " mean? I m sorry , i just didn`t get what exactly that meant

 

[anon(30413)]

Thanks. Informative indeed but what exactly does "powering up the radio " mean? I m sorry , i just didn`t get what exactly that meant

That is when you turn on the cellular data,it is often referred to as a radio,also going from airplane mode to on/active would also count. I've only recently come back to WP after trying Android after getting put out with WP 6.0/6.5,so please someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong /rusty on the terminology.





Sent from my PM23300 using Tapatalk

 

[mtalinm]

For what it's worth, last night I charged my phone to 95% and then left it unplugged on the desk until this morning. Battery reading this morning was ... 95%

 

[hopmedic]

Thanks. Informative indeed but what exactly does "powering up the radio " mean? I m sorry , i just didn`t get what exactly that meant

That is when you turn on the cellular data,it is often referred to as a radio,also going from airplane mode to on/active would also count. I've only recently come back to WP after trying Android after getting put out with WP 6.0/6.5,so please someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong /rusty on the terminology.

Pretty much. I don't know the details, but do listen to several WP podcasts and several developer podcasts. I don't recall which one it was, but a while back one of them had one of the engineers from the WP team as a guest on the show, and he talked a good deal about this. Powering up the data radio is what he said was quite an expensive process, in battery, because of the things that have to happen to open the connection. I'm guessing now, but I'd say that not only is it the cost of transmitting power, but also the processing time that it takes to establish the communication.

Because powering up the radio is so expensive, the OS decides when to run background agents, and it does so at times when it would have the radio powered up for its own purposes (this is why developers and users can't decide how often to run the agents). The frequency of this is every thirty minutes, but can vary either direction by ten minutes. So your background agents will run once every 20-40 minutes. I don't know what the variables are that would make it vary that plus/minus ten minutes.

 

[manicottiK]

Adding to what hopmedic said, that +/- 10 minute variance allows the OS to "group" several periodic tasks to run at once (or serially with no time gap between them). This lets the OS do just one "get set to do data communications" operation, run a bunch of tasks, then just one "shut down the data communications" operation rather than doing the setup/teardown more frequently. Grouping them saves on battery power as do the other rules that limit run time and memory use for periodic tasks.

In the end, the same restrictions that we (as both users and developers) complain about having imposed on us (and our apps) by Microsoft are also what give us some of the benefits (long battery life) that we enjoy. We can't yet have it all, but we can keep wanting it! :smile:

 

[elmacho]

Pretty much. I don't know the details, but do listen to several WP podcasts and several developer podcasts. I don't recall which one it was, but a while back one of them had one of the engineers from the WP team as a guest on the show, and he talked a good deal about this. Powering up the data radio is what he said was quite an expensive process, in battery, because of the things that have to happen to open the connection. I'm guessing now, but I'd say that not only is it the cost of transmitting power, but also the processing time that it takes to establish the communication.

Because powering up the radio is so expensive, the OS decides when to run background agents, and it does so at times when it would have the radio powered up for its own purposes (this is why developers and users can't decide how often to run the agents). The frequency of this is every thirty minutes, but can vary either direction by ten minutes. So your background agents will run once every 20-40 minutes. I don't know what the variables are that would make it vary that plus/minus ten minutes.

Thanks a lot .I feel this battery app live tile problem that I face is related to this" powering up the radio " thing in some way .Possibly its ideally designed for those cases where the mobile data connection is left as it is , where there is some correspondence between the tower and the mobile phone every 30-40 minutes. Unfortunately, mobile data isn`t very cheap here which forces me to turn it off when I don`t use it . Seems there is no workaround but I feel battery apps shouldn`t be forced to adhere to such restrictions or be classified with the rest of the background tasks,just my opinion though.
Being new to windows phone,i do feel MSFT has to relax the API restrictions ,no access to video library, things like these and should provide some basic file management IMO. I never bought a WP7 device because of the lack of Bluetooth support. MS is even at this age, a lot less global,hope the Nokia acquisition helps them.

 

[hopmedic]

Thanks a lot .I feel this battery app live tile problem that I face is related to this" powering up the radio " thing in some way .Possibly its ideally designed for those cases where the mobile data connection is left as it is , where there is some correspondence between the tower and the mobile phone every 30-40 minutes. Unfortunately, mobile data isn`t very cheap here which forces me to turn it off when I don`t use it . Seems there is no workaround but I feel battery apps shouldn`t be forced to adhere to such restrictions or be classified with the rest of the background tasks,just my opinion though.
Being new to windows phone,i do feel MSFT has to relax the API restrictions ,no access to video library, things like these and should provide some basic file management,just my opinion though. I never bought a WP7 device because of the lack of Bluetooth support. MS is even at this age, a lot less global,hope the Nokia acquisition helps them.

The radio isn't the only thing that uses power to start up - there are other things that have to get moving in order to run a background agent, whether it uses the radio or not. It's just that the radio costs the most to start up. The 20-40 minute cycle for background agents takes all of this into consideration, not just the radio.

Lots of us would love to see some of the APIs loosened up, but we're not in a position to make the change. :wink:

 

[mariusfilip]

hello, i read most of the topics about weather apps, i use apps like Accuweather and Bing,and from i understood those are helped by the gps to give us the best forecast...i was wondering ,is there an app on WP8 (or any other platform like iOS ar Android) that uses only Gps for this apps? i'm asking in case i don't have any internet acces and want to know the outside temp/forecast...etc ) thanks in advance :smile:

 

[manicottiK]

...is there a [weather] app on WP8 (or any other platform like iOS ar Android) that uses only Gps ...in case i don't have any internet access

No. While the phone can pick up the GPS signal, that signal doesn't have any other data. Internet access is needed to pull down the weather data for the GPS coordinates that the phone provides.