Battery drainage

[valsu]

On my Android phone aTox is using a lot of battery even when "idle". Recently aTox accounted for 60% of the battery drain, even when the phone is supposed to be in sleepmode.

[robinlinden]

Hi!

Yeah, that's sadly how the Tox protocol works right now. In order to be online so your contacts can see you, you have to continuously send and receive packets, so your phone is never able to go into deep sleep.
I'm experimenting a bit with different solutions, but right now it's unavoidable (and expected.) :(

What do you think of something like #485? That would allow you to stay online when you're presumably around your house, and aTox would automatically go to sleep when you're out and about and not likely near a charger?

[valsu]

What do you think of something like #485? That would allow you to stay online when you're presumably around your house, and aTox would automatically go to sleep when you're out and about and not likely near a charger?

I think that would be an option worth adding. Another idea would be to add a setting for intervals the client actually goes online.

[robinlinden]

Yeah, that's also a neat idea. Opened an issue to track it in case someone wants to work on it before I get to it. :P

[gustavo-nramires]

Maybe the client and servers could coordinate meeting intervals, say a few seconds every few minutes. 5 seconds every 5 minutes should be 5/300 ~= 1.7% of the original battery usage!

Idea: Maybe the client should wake up every X minutes, and wait for the sender to send a status message, saying if there are any incoming messages, and whether he is still alive; if he sends nothing, sleep back after a timeout -- in that case perhaps the client could send a message, to make sure the sender didn't lose clock sync or reset his device, and if there's not reply they can be declared offline