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How many times have you heard that the next big iteration of Android will substantially increase battery life? The answer is essentially every time and sure we see slight battery life improvements from these updates, but nothing substantial. Google is singing the same tune with the upcoming version of Android, Android M. Google is calling this part of Android M, project Doze, which will supposedly offer users virtually double their current stand-by battery life.
Doze, giving users double the battery life while their device is in standby sounds pretty great, but it turns out that Google may have actually undersold Doze. There are some reports floating around the internet from users running the Android M developer preview, who are suggesting they are getting some insane battery life. One of those reports has got quite a bit of attention comes from a reddit user claiming that he got 297 hours of standby battery life out of his Nexus 5 running the Android M developer preview. That means that the Nexus 5 was consuming less than a half a percentage of battery life every hour. This test was done with a Nexus 5 connected to a carrier and WiFi with the display only being turned on at intervals to check battery percentage.
For those of you unsure of what Doze is or more importantly, what it does then here is a short explanation. Doze does some intelligent things in the background of your device and while it is in standby that optimizes the battery life. More specifically, it puts your device into an ultra-low power mode that keeps processes and apps from running wild in the background while you aren’t using your device. Of course, Doze will also be smart enough to allow some apps to perform high-priority tasks when necessary, such as having an alarm go off when it is needed.
Doze in Android M is a pretty amazing feature and one which seems to be, offering some promising results. It will be interesting to see how non-Nexus devices interact with the feature and whether they can generate similar results. Either way, if 297 days of standby time is anything to go by and on an older device, it is something worth getting excited about.