Mobile App Development Archives - Page 24 of 26

The battery life of a smartphone is one of the crucial aspects of the mobile user experience, isn’t it?

Users mostly tend to buy the smartphone that promises longer battery life. But despite choosing the best one in the market, phone batteries can drain out and underperform owing to numerous factors. Factors like fast internet connections, speedy processors, thinner phone bodies, brighter screens, etc. badly affect the devices’ battery. But, heavy and unoptimized mobile apps are one of the top reasons that lead to poor battery life. Even a popular app like Facebook is known for draining the battery of mobile phones.

However, there are some remedies that can be useful in resolving this common issue. In this article, we will shed light on those remedies and focus on how mobile app developers and app development companies can optimize mobile apps for better battery life. We will also take you through the downsides of not optimizing the mobile apps. So let’s quickly get started.

Drawbacks of Battery-consuming Mobile Apps on Users and the App Owners

It may burden the RAM and affect the functioning of the app at times.
An app that consumes more battery threatens the battery life of the users’ phones.
Such apps can attract negative reviews on search engines or Play Store/App Store, despite being innovative and useful.
Such apps can create a bad impression and compel the users to uninstall the app, thus affecting the app owner’s business too.

Noteworthy Tips to Optimize Mobile Apps for a Prolonged Battery Life

There are three important points to remember, as mentioned below:

1. Making your mobile app Lazy First.

Lazy First Design means finding ways for reducing and optimizing the battery-intensive processes. In this regard, there are some questions that come up and you need to consider answering them while using the CP, the screen, and the radio. Those questions are:

Cut-out Operations: Are there any redundant operations that the mobile application can do without? For instance, can it cache downloaded data rather than waking up the radio repeatedly for re-downloading the data?

Postpone: Are there any tasks that can be deferred by the app? For instance, to back-up the data up to the cloud, can the app wait until the mobile phone is charging?

Coalesce: Is it possible to batch the tasks rather than putting the device into an active state again and again?

So, these issues can be resolved by leveraging some features on the Android platform. Let’s have a look.

2. Leveraging platform features that helps in managing the battery consumption of the app.

For managing the battery consumption in mobile apps, the Android platform provides various APIs that can be implemented in the apps. Besides, some internal mechanisms are also available in the platform for conserving battery life. These mechanisms include- Doze and App Standby, App Standby Buckets, Background restrictions, Power management restrictions, Testing, and troubleshooting, etc.

Also, Android 9 has made various enhancements to the battery saver mode. Manufacturers of devices can determine the precise restrictions to be imposed. For example, the system applies the below-given restrictions on AOSP builds:

Rather than waiting for the app to be idle, the system aggressively puts the apps in app standby mode.
There are some limits put on all the background apps for executing any tasks.
Network access is restricted to the background apps.
When the screen of an app is off, the location services would be disabled.

You may have a look at the device-specific power optimizations here.

3. Utilizing special tools for identification of battery-draining culprits.

Mobile apps can be further optimized by making use of special platform tools. These tools help to identify specific areas of the app that consume more battery so that those areas can be worked upon for successful optimization of apps. For Android, these tools include Battery Historian, Profile GPU Rendering, etc. These can also be used to resolve the areas identified in the Lazy First design.

Final Words:

Modern-day smartphone users are very particular about adding apps to their phones. If they find that a certain app is draining their battery too much, they may choose to delete the app even though it is one of their favorite apps. So, every mobile app development company must consider this and optimize mobile apps for better battery life and thus, increase the chances of their app not being uninstalled. The aforesaid tips would be of great help in this case.

If you want to create a new-age mobile app and have an influential idea in your mind, discuss it with our team at Biz4Solutions! We will partner with you to architect an advanced mobile app with our robust mobile app development process.

Serverless App Development is the latest trend in the IT sector! Yet, several questions arise in the minds of entrepreneurs planning to execute serverless architecture for their next app development project.

What is serverless architecture?

How is the serverless model different from other prevalent cloud computing models?

What are the opportunities and obstacles of serverless applications?

Is my business going to benefit from the serverless computing model?

Well, this article answers all the aforesaid questions! So, let’s commence.

What is serverless architecture?

Serverless architecture refers to a software design pattern in which a third-party service hosts the applications; so that the developers need not engage in the task of managing the server software and hardware. This approach is also known as serverless computing as the app logic gets implemented in an eco-system wherein servers, OS, and virtual machines are not visible. This doesn’t mean that servers are not used at all. The app logic is executed on an OS that uses physical servers. But, the difference with other cloud services is that; here the service provider wholly takes up the responsibility of infrastructure management and so the mobile app developer can focus only on writing codes.

Categories of Serverless Applications:

FaaS (Function as a Service/Feature as a Service), the serverless model enables developers to build, run and manage the app functionalities; without having to create or maintain the infrastructure needed for developing and launching the app. The first FaaS service provider was AWS Lambda by Amazon, followed by several others like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Functions, etc.

PaaS (Platform as a Service), another category of cloud computing, bears similarity with FaaS as they too hide servers from developers. But, unlike FaaS this service runs one server process continually for receiving external requests. The app is scaled by booting up more server processors, for which the developer is charged and so the scalability is visible to the developer.

BaaS (Backend as a Service), is another prominent model which addresses the cloud-computing requirements for the mobile and web app developers by offering them a unified means of connecting their apps to cloud computing services. As such, BaaS automates the development of the backend for the web and mobile and also manages the cloud infrastructure. This enables the mobile and web app development companies to only focus on the frontend part of the application.

SaaS (Software as a Service), is a software distribution service model. Here, a cloud provider hosts the software apps and empowers the end-users to connect and use those apps over the internet. Usually, users employ web browsers to access SaaS apps. Independent software vendors may give SaaS contracts to third-party cloud providers for hosting the app. A single company can also be the cloud provider as well as the software vendor; this is usually the case with big firms.

SaaS users enjoy the convenience of accessing their app through the internet instead of having to install and manage complex software and hardware. The app runs on the servers of the SaaS providers who does SaaS development. The provider handles all app-related tasks like access, performance, availability, and security.

Serverless Applications: Advantages

Reduced Administrative and Infrastructural burden

The hassle of managing servers passes on to the vendor, resulting in the following benefits for a mobile and web app development company.

Firms need not spend a huge amount on the hardware or hire engineers for maintaining that hardware.
More time and resources can be dedicated to creating and improving customer-facing features.
Developers have the flexibility of crafting and scaling the apps as required; without having to worry about the constraint of server capacity.

Cost-efficient Pricing Model

In traditional server-full architectural setups, developers have to figure out in advance the amount of server capacity needed; based on which the company purchases the capacity whether or not they end up using it. However, serverless setups follow the “pay-as-you-go” policy which means the vendor charges the company only for the amount of server space they use. The code runs whenever the serverless application needs backend functions and gets automatically scaled up whenever required. Also, provisioning is precise, dynamic, and happens in real-time. As FaaS charges a fraction of the price per request, a start-up can build an MVP at minimal cost without having to pay huge bills for lesser traffic.

Quicker Deployments and Updates

The serverless model eliminates the tasks of uploading the code to servers or engaging in any backend configuration for releasing a fully functional app. Hence, developers can speedily upload bits of code and launch a new app. As the app is a collection of functions provisioned by the service provider, rather than being a single monolithic stack; developers can either upload the entire code at one go or upload one function at a time. This ability speeds up the tasks of fixing, patching, or updating the app without any need to make changes in the entire application.

Latency Reduction

Since the app does not get hosted in the origin server, it becomes possible to run its code from anywhere. As such, the app’s functions can be run on servers that are close to the end-user depending on the vendor selected. This strategy reduces latency as the requests coming from the user need not travel a long way to reach an origin server.

Inherent Scalability

Serverless applications are capable of scaling automatically with the increase in the number of user base or usage. If a function requires to be run several times, the vendor’s servers will start, run and end them as required using separate containers. This provides the ability to handle a higher number of requests effectively as compared to a traditionally structured app.

Serverless Applications: Downsides

As the vendor fully controls the operations, a firm has to abide by their rules. For instance, if your app is set in Lambda it’s not easy to port it to Azure. This concern applies to coding languages as well. Presently only Python and Node.js developers have the flexibility to choose between the prevalent serverless options.
FaaS tools involve a steep learning curve despite the availability of comprehensive documentation.
Companies need to split their monolith into microservices for painlessly migrating to a serverless model.
Debugging and troubleshooting become challenging as serverless apps use traditional tools.
This model is great for short real-time processes but an additional function needs to be called if the task takes longer. Traditional approaches fare better for indulging in extended duration operations.

Bottom line

Serverless computing best suits start-ups and small businesses. But, if your company has a well-established workflow, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons before making a decision. For technical assistance with cloud solutions or any mobile app development services, connect to Biz4Solutions, a leading cloud service provider.

Mobile App Development, Page 24 Category

Handy Tips for Mobile App Developers to Optimize Mobile Apps for Better Battery Life!