Which Lemmy android app is the most battery efficient?
Does it make a difference which one I use? I am using an old phone (~5 years old). Currently using liftoff! and connect. Feel like my phone is dying a lot quicker since I switched from using infinity for reddit a month or so ago
Fk this is going to sound so boastful but I architected Summit for Lemmy for efficiency from the ground up. Give it a try. I’m curious if you notice a difference.
I get asked this a lot. I should really make a FAQ.
The short answer is I created Summit and work on it for my own enjoyment. I do it purely for fun. It is not open source because open sourcing it creates a lot of pain points and diminishes my enjoyment of working on the project.
If you have any questions about this I would be happy to answer them.
I always wonder when people say something like this. I also develop a Lemmy app myself and don’t understand this point, like are you afraid people will complain about your code cleanliness or commenting techniques?
I mean what extra work is there really? Moving secrets to environment variables is annoying, I get that at least.
I mean no offense to you at all, really, but when I check out other Lemmy apps I don’t even bother with closed source ones since I can’t possibly know if you just steal login information. Especially since this is so immensely easy with Lemmy.
Again, I’m not saying you do these things but it’s always better being able to check yourself, you know?
Different people have different preferences. I respect people who can open source their app and feel no negatives about it. I’ve worked on enough open source projects to know it’s not for me.
I mean if I wanted to do it for selfless reasons I would do it but here I’m working on the project for my own enjoyment.
There are a lot of reasons why open sourcing the app would reduce my enjoyment of working on the app.
I’ll try to list some of them.
I feel pressured to be a role model. I understand people learn from open source code. This puts pressure on me because I feel like any code I publish needs to act like a good role model for learners. At this point writing code has turned into what I do at my job. Why would I want my personal hobby to turn into my job?
I’ve been writing code for a very long time and I’ve learned what I like and what I don’t like. Due to this I’m pretty anal and opinionated when it comes to my own code bases. This pretty much eliminates any chance id want anyone to contribute to my open source projects. Because again that would mean I’d have to review their code and we are back this hobby turning into my job.
I want full control of my own project and how the app is distributed. That means I don’t want people to fork it and then release variants of it. Honestly if that happens id just quit working on the app. So another avenue where open sourcing the project can only bring problems.
So if you look at all of this I stand to gain almost nothing from open sourcing the app and I pretty much just lose.
It’s one of the core design principles I use when making decisions about implementations. I can share some examples where this mattered.
The app is pretty aggressive about caching. This should reduce the number of unnecessary network calls. Network calls are expensive both for performance reasons and on your battery (try it out, turn on airplane mode and watch your phone last 1 week on a single charge).
Another example is unnecessary computation of changes and of UI elements. This again both increased performance and battery life.
Hey man, just tried summit. So far it’s super quick but it’s almost too barebones for me. But I’m going to give it a try for a week and see if it grows on me.
If you have anything in particular you’d like to see in the app feel free to create a post or comment on one of the release threads in the Summit community: lemmy.world/c/summit.
Oh, also if you want to be even more conscious about battery/performance/not hammering Lemmy servers I would recommend turning off infinite scrolling (it’s the first setting within the post list settings screen).
This should also give you more time back since it’s less addictive than infinite scrolling.
You should use one with an AMOLED dark mode. Usually the screen uses the most battery and if your phone supports AMOLED it actually turns the pixels off to make blacks, which is more energy efficient. I have Connect, Liftoff, and Jerboa and they all offer it as a theme option although Jerboa calls it System Black (I think that’s the same thing anyway).
But only if you actually have an (AM)OLED phone. On OLED only bright pixels consume power. On LCD the backlight is equally as bright, no matter of the pixel colors, and actually, dark pixels consume very slightly more power than bright pixels.
i’m using mlmym using the browser… I have a very low end (in today’s world) MSM8974-based 2013 phone with an Android 11 custom rom and wefwef or jerboa is too much for it.
A browser made with native Java/Kotlin which then has to setup an environment for running HTML, Javascript and CSS, is obviously going to be slower and heavier on the battery, than an app made in just Java/Kotlin
You don’t realise it because you have a fast enough phone probably. My 5 year old cheap ass phone can’t run Voyager or other PWAs without major stutters, but Jerboa works perfectly fine
It’s good that you wear out the phone til the end.
There are a few things that could help you speed up your phone by a lot. I am assuming you are on Android. If you are on Apple I can’t help you.
Older Android version there is a cache partition. Clearing that will boost the phone’s speed by a lot. For that, google how to get into recovery on your phone and select “Clear cache” if that option is available. This is a safe operation where you lose nothing. DO NOT DO “Clear data” unless you want to lose all your data.
Uninstall unnecessary browsers. Many browsers keep running in the background and consume resources. Most apps do that, but browsers consume lots of resources. Maybe only keep the ones you can’t delete plus maybe one you like.
Clear cache of the browser apps frequently. Especially Firefox seems to get slower the fuller the cache is. Also, cache consumes storage space.
Disable preinstalled apps that you don’t use.
Force close apps that you do use but that don’t need to be running in the background.
On older Android versions install Greenify and let it kill all apps that have no business running in the background.
Thanks for the detailed response! I am using lineageOS on an old oneplus 6T. I only have the mull browser installed, but will make sure to clear the cache on it! Will see if there are any apps running in the background I am unaware of and kill them.
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