Nokia smartphones ditch aggressive app killing for Android’s Adaptive Battery

Ben Schoon | Aug 27 2019 - 7:34 am PT

Battery life is something that’s important to all smartphone users, but sometimes methods of squeezing out a bit of extra screen time are ill-advised. Nokia has just announced that it will get rid of a battery-saving method that aggressively killed background apps in exchange for Android’s own Adaptive Battery feature.

In a brief post, Nokia explains that it has been using a service called “Evenwell” which helped to save battery life by controlling background applications. A quick look at rankings from “Don’t Kill My App” shows (via Android Police) that Nokia’s solution, effective as it may be for battery life, would aggressively kill background applications despite any user workarounds. This was even happening on Android One devices.

Now, Nokia is ditching “Evenwell” for Android’s Adaptive Battery feature. This was first introduced in Android Pie but actually wasn’t included with Nokia’s new products or updates to that OS version. The Nokia 8, for example, completely lacked Adaptive Battery when it was updated to Android Pie.

In this post, Nokia says that “Evenwell” has been disabled on older releases that now have Android Pie, and new releases don’t have that service installed at all. Adaptive Battery is the new battery manager for all Nokia Android smartphones, and that’s definitely a positive move.

Adaptive battery uses deep learning to understand usage patterns and prioritise battery and is more intelligent AI driven approach for battery and performance management and is available across the range of Nokia smartphones running Android 9 Pie. When our devices that launched with Android N or Android O originally upgraded to Android 9 Pie, we started to gradually disable Evenwell while carefully monitoring end user feedback. Now we have completely disabled Evenwell from our legacy devices so even if you see the solution there, it does not do anything. On our new devices launching with Android 9 P (or later) releases we do not have Evenwell at all.