A great many of the applications I create, run in the background and periodically send or receive information from a server. The Sony Ericsson Developer blog has just published an interesting post today on ‘Reducing power consumption of connected apps’. While the post talks about and provide examples for Android, the techniques can also be applied to some other platforms.

In summary, they are…

• Synchronize your polls with other apps
• Make polls short
• Manage your connections
• Stop your services

Now that network operators are starting to drop ‘unlimited‘ tariffs, it’s not just power consumption but also data consumption that is becoming critical for users. An app communicating several times an hour can quickly rack up significant data use.

Here are some corresponding tips on reducing data usage…

• Optimise your data design to do multiple requests for data in one transaction with the server
• If using HTTP then use HTTP compression
• Allow the user to view how much data has been used and allow them to change polling periods
• Have the server know when the phone was last updated and only send what’s charged rather than ‘everything’
• Avoid XML based web services and use simple HTTP GET, POST and JSON
• Think about using TCP rather than HTTP
• Don’t use SSL unless you really have to (does it really have to be that secure?)
• Where possible, use server initiated notification systems rather than polling

Thinking more about data use and polling will also provide large server scalability gains that you will appreciate once you start getting larger numbers of users.

Related Articles:

• Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM)
• Server Side IO and Bandwidth
• iPhone Push Notification Tutorial
• Duplicate Code
• Scalability
• Cloud Data Backup
• What is Push?
• More on Mobile Applications and Web Services
• Mobile Applications and Web Services

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Mobile. Both comments and pings are currently closed.