Project Volta is an attempt to boost the battery life of Android devices. Like the projects that came before it, Volta is a wide-ranging effort that touches many different parts of the OS.<\/p>\n
For each Android release, Google likes to have a “Project” that picks an area of weakness and focuses on tuning the whole OS to fix it. In Jelly Bean it had Project Butter, a concerted effort to make Android’s UI animations run at 60fps. In KitKat there was Project Svelte, which aimed to get the OS running on only 512MB of RAM after optimizing memory performance. Now in Android L (Lollipop), Google has decided to tackle the most talked about issue about our smartphones – battery life. This is an awfully tricky thing to solve, particularly as the smartphones are constantly getting more powerful; featuring larger screens; and being used more and more for everything from downloads to browsing online to shopping online. So instead of strapping an enormous battery pack to the back or making the devices huge in order to accommodate much bigger batteries, Google has looked to optimise the Android Lollipop OS, so that our devices last longer – and hopefully any updated Android phone will see the benefit.<\/p>\n
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At the core of the effort comes an interesting find: the company monitored stats from the Nexus 5 revealing that roughly every 1 second of unnecessary active time (this would be the processor and modem waking up to check for updates or do a task it could do later) results in a 2-minute reduction in stand-by time. Now, imagine this on your average smartphone with 50 apps running, each taking 1 second of unnecessary active time per hour. Those seemingly small interruptions add up to a massive 100-minute reduction of your stand-by battery time for every hour all those apps run. And 1 second of unnecessary activity per hour might even be an optimistic scenario for some apps.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n