Auto open/close battery usage ideas
I'm super excited that auto open/close works again on my android with an external bluetooth beacon. This has been a fantastic feature for me on my motorcycle with all my gear on.
I have noticed that with auto open/close enabled, there is significant battery drain which is less than ideal. As a developer, I wanted to suggest a few ideas for improving the app behavior that might help the battery drain situation. I am not an android or ios developer so I'm not sure which options are within the realm of feasibility so I wanted to put a few different ideas out there. I'm also willing to test some beta builds if that would be helpful.
I've had the tailwind app for several years, and I have recently re-activated auto open/close. My battery experience has gone from being able to charge around noon, and wake up in the morning with 25-40% on a regular day, to fully charging at 9pm and waking up with less than 30%. My suggestions are all based on the assumption that the app is accessing location frequently, which is quite battery intensive.
- Only poll GPS location while bluetooth connection (to beacon or vehicle) is active
- Allow windows of time where auto open/close will be active
- Create a quick toggle that can be put on the home screen or pull down to enable/disable with a single click
Option 1 is perhaps the most seamless user experience and makes a lot of sense from an efficiency perspective
Option 2 could help in that someone like myself never rides the motorcycle after 6pm for example. So the app could discontinue checking location from 6pm to (in my case 6am the next day)
Option 3 is probably the least convenient from a user perspective, but quite likely the easiest from a programming perspective -- it could be useful in that I could activate auto open/close when heading out for a ride, then I could deactivate it once I return home.
Please feel free to ask questions, add suggestions, or inform me if there's some existing functionality or workaround that I could be leveraging to accomplish similar results and reduce overnight battery drain
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Official comment
Hi Jon,
Thank you for posting. Without seeing a bug report I can't say why the battery drain would be so large, but I can tell you that it should be quite minimal. For example, I'm currently testing on a Google Pixel 8 and 2 Samsung phones. The battery drain for the Tailwind app is at most 2%. I have both types of vehicles configured (vehicle bluetooth and vehicle sensor).
So something is wrong and I can help you further if you email support@gotailwind.comOur app uses the native bluetooth methods within Android OS to detect when a vehicle is connected, so that doesn't add any battery drain. When a vehicle bluetooth is connected the app does track location, but it throttles those location updates and the accuracy of them depending on how close to home you are. The further away you go, the less frequently it updates and with lower accuracy / precision to minimize battery drain.
In the case of vehicle sensors, our app will only scan for a sensor if the phone is moving, and that is also throttled to minimize battery drain.Comment actions
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