[FEEDBACK-11996] mobile battery life

Ignition Early Access
1

I noticed using the demo Ignition Perspective mobile app (I was using an android phone) that my battery life was greatly reduced while keeping the app running (even in the background). I know battery life is greatly affected by two things on my phone: use of the camera, and use of maps (location data). I don’t know what control is possible in perspective, but the ability to keep a mobile device running all day without killing the battery would be ideal.

  1. Is there any control over when location and or camera use is active?

  2. Is there any control over the location accuracy from within perspective (this could reduce battery use)?

2

Great questions. First, know that we had GPS turned up to 11 for the demo (still do) for a number of reasons. The final release will definitely provide you with some options in terms of GPS activity.

  1. Yes - you can toggle GPS activity via a property associated with your project. We’re still working on perspective documentation and I don’t see a reference to it yet, but setting gps to active/disactive is as simple as setting a property value to true.
  2. Yes. We are still working through details in how we expose options across different devices (Android has different location settings from iOs, which is different from laptops/browsers. etc), but there will definitely be some control over how accurate your GPS settings are (which directly correlates to battery life).

For the camera, I wouldn’t expect it to be running in the background, we’d want to hear about something like that if you experienced lots of energy use due to perspective’s use of camera for barcode scanning.

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3

I can understand having GPS settings turned up for the demo, but wanted to know if we would have granularity at some point. Appreciate the insight and look forward to using Perspective once it comes out.

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4

We probably could be smarter about turning the GPS on and off depending on navigation, as well. This is just a configuration item in the demo project.

5

The way the demo project is configured, GPS is turned off by default. If you go to Real-Time Status -> Mobile, you can enable GPS. In the demo project, High Accuracy is also turned off, and we didn’t provide a UI switch to turn it on.

6

What Kevin may not be aware of (queue evil developer snicker in here), is that on both Android and iOS, we've been ignoring the highAccuracy setting altogether and use 'max accuracy' if GPS was enabled when the project is running in the native application. We'll publish updated apps that appropriately apply geolocation accuracy settings before the private beta is released.

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