- Google says they’ve sped up how fast phones enter doze mode by 50% in Android 15.
- The result is that some devices are seeing up to 3 hours longer standby power on the latest OS.
- This improvement will be coming to all devices that receive the Android 15 update.
Every major Android update brings a couple of high-level, user-facing features that get a bunch of marketing and attention, but they also make a lot of low-level, under-the-hood changes that can be just as important from a user experience perspective. Take the upcoming Android 15 update as an example. At this week’s Google I/O 2024 developer conference, the second beta of Android 15 was announced with headline-grabbing features like Private Space, App Pairs, improved theft detection services, and a whole lot more. But during I/O, Google also quietly shared some interesting statistics about Android 15, such as that it improves standby battery life by up to three hours on some devices.
At Google I/O, I asked Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for the Android Platform, and Sameet Samat, President of the Android Ecosystem, to explain how Google achieved the battery life improvements that they announced as part of the latest version of Wear OS. If you missed the announcement, Google basically said that marathon runs on smartwatches running Wear OS 5 consume up to 20% less power than they do on Wear OS 4. Samat said this specific improvement was achieved by making a variety of optimizations, with one example being a reduction in how long it takes for the device’s main applications processor (AP) to go back to sleep after being woken up to write some health data. (For the full interview with Dave Burke and Sameet Samat, check out episode 44 of the Android Faithful podcast, of which I am a co-host).