Creating a monolithic power/battery manager

[sonicityV]

Hey there, I've been thinking for a bit. Would it be plausible to create a monolithic power/battery manager?

Heres a short list of battery and power apps and what they do:

• Battery Chart (logs battery and shows chart)
• Charge Gently (vibration to take battery off charger)
• Power Manager (logs battery and power consumption, stabalizes voltage and battery percentage, provides drainage and sensor power widget)
• Smart Battery (logs drainage and gives time estimation, provides estimation widget and clockinfo)
• Drained ( enables low power savings by disabling sensors)
• Device Stats Widget (provides sensor power widget)

So its pretty obvious that theres alot of overlap and potential for turning everything into one Power Manager module, library and app.

Just want to gauge peoples opinion. Honestly might give it a shot anyways.

[RKBoss6]

That looks good! The only problem I can see with this is that the app will be quite big for what it does, and will most likely need many separate log files, as different apps log different things. I was thinking of making an app for this that just displays drainage, time until it dies, has charge warnings if battery gets low, etc. This would be a good implementation of some of those things... :)

[RKBoss6]

I think we might be able to bundle most things that overlap, but maybe keep power manager separate, as it is already a solution for battery logging.
Or vice-versa, bundle all the additional features into power manager as well.

[gfwilliams]

It feels to me like some of the apps there are actually very simple, and wouldn't really share code with others in any useful way.

At some point you have to ask whether it's easier for users to:

a) install the big power manager app and then go digging around in settings to enable/disable what they want
b) go to the app loader and search and install the app they want for that specific feature

And I think a lot of time the second option is better as long as there's not tons of code duplication.

I think we have to be careful we don't end up with a big app with a bunch of code that takes a long time to load and stays in memory all the time, when perhaps all someone wants is a small part of it.

If there is substantial overlap in how power drainage is logged then perhaps splitting that into a library would be handy for Power Manager/Smart Battery, especially if it means the data can be logged in a more efficient way - but even then it feels like that's only for 2 apps and I wonder whether the effort involved is worth it.

The health app now logs battery, so I wonder whether Battery Chart really needs to log itself or if it should just use the health data+library now - that would be a very simple addition with the benefit that it'd work to look at battery usage from before the app was even installed.

[RKBoss6]

@gfwilliams Hey, quick question, why does the health app log battery? Seems a bit strange, as it is for user health...

[gfwilliams]

It got added recently - I asked around for the kind of things folks thought should be logged. While not specifically health, it does make a lot of sense to log it every 10 minutes as you can get a good idea of battery usage/health and even how linear the battery meter is.