- In the App Store, at the bottom of the Product Description, its says that "Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life". Why is this there and what does this mean?
In the Wyld Mesh Trial app, we send location information back to our server periodically, so we can deliver notifications to you, that are relevant to your location. We need to include a special configuration in the app, to allow the location information to be obtained when the app is in the background, and Apple requires us to include this disclaimer when anyone uses this special configuration. But the SmartMetro app is Smarter than that. We take special precautions and we don't turn on the location gathering service continuously. We do everything possible to preserve your battery, but we are required to tell you this.
- What is the impact on battery life
Currently, we have optimised our solution so that the impact on the users’ battery is only moderate, where it was high before the optimisations. Location services (like having Google maps open) have the biggest impact on battery life, and the optimisations we have made reduced battery drain greater than 4x.
The mesh networking components battery drain depends on which P2P Radio Access Technology(RAT) is used: P2P Wi-Fi or Bluetooth LE (BTLE).
BTLE uses less energy than P2P Wi-Fi, yet most uses and to keep Wi-Fi on always. Again, we have optimised our solution to minimise the impact on battery life
We regularly monitor battery drain with Apple’s XCode and Googles Android Development environments and use AT&T’s ARO utility to benchmark battery and network usage.