<story><title>Uber prices seem to increase when phone battery is low</title><url>https://twitter.com/NerdyAndNatural/status/1427614996738068485</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angrygoat</author><text>I struggle to see a legitimate reason for an app to be able to access battery level. It&amp;#x27;s pretty unlikely that app is going to change behaviour to preserve battery life – that&amp;#x27;s probably better handled by the OS slowing things down. Better to simply deny the app this information.</text></item><item><author>jadengeller</author><text>There are APIs for this.&lt;p&gt;iOS: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.apple.com&amp;#x2F;documentation&amp;#x2F;uikit&amp;#x2F;uidevice&amp;#x2F;1620042-batterylevel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.apple.com&amp;#x2F;documentation&amp;#x2F;uikit&amp;#x2F;uidevice&amp;#x2F;162...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Android: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.android.com&amp;#x2F;reference&amp;#x2F;android&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;BatteryManager&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.android.com&amp;#x2F;reference&amp;#x2F;android&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;BatteryMa...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>Kranar</author><text>This should not be something that alleged without evidence. It would be trivial to take multiple phones with different battery levels and compare the prices. You could also vary the distance between the phones. Furthermore, and I could be wrong on this, I don&amp;#x27;t recall there being any API to get the battery life remaining.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>Apps &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; change behaviors to preserve battery life though. Things like disabling prefetching will likely reduce radio time and thus preserve battery.&lt;p&gt;Delaying maintenance can help too, and that also helps reduce occurances of power failed during complex data operation and the resulting difficulties of resuming from a partial operation when the state may not have been fully persisted at any point, because filesystems and abrupt power loss don&amp;#x27;t tend to go so well together.</text></comment>
<story><title>Uber prices seem to increase when phone battery is low</title><url>https://twitter.com/NerdyAndNatural/status/1427614996738068485</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angrygoat</author><text>I struggle to see a legitimate reason for an app to be able to access battery level. It&amp;#x27;s pretty unlikely that app is going to change behaviour to preserve battery life – that&amp;#x27;s probably better handled by the OS slowing things down. Better to simply deny the app this information.</text></item><item><author>jadengeller</author><text>There are APIs for this.&lt;p&gt;iOS: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.apple.com&amp;#x2F;documentation&amp;#x2F;uikit&amp;#x2F;uidevice&amp;#x2F;1620042-batterylevel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.apple.com&amp;#x2F;documentation&amp;#x2F;uikit&amp;#x2F;uidevice&amp;#x2F;162...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Android: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.android.com&amp;#x2F;reference&amp;#x2F;android&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;BatteryManager&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.android.com&amp;#x2F;reference&amp;#x2F;android&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;BatteryMa...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>Kranar</author><text>This should not be something that alleged without evidence. It would be trivial to take multiple phones with different battery levels and compare the prices. You could also vary the distance between the phones. Furthermore, and I could be wrong on this, I don&amp;#x27;t recall there being any API to get the battery life remaining.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gregoriol</author><text>First things first: you could develop a custom interface within your app, think of games for example, to show the battery level, or simply an icon when it&amp;#x27;s low, in a specific way instead of the system&amp;#x27;s style.&lt;p&gt;Then, depending on what your app does, you can act on a few things to reduce, or not, battery usage when it gets below some thresholds: reduce GPS precision, remove some animations, limit framerate, make less networking requests, ... It could be limited by the system, but it would probably not be as wise regarding to what is important in the context of one app vs another.&lt;p&gt;We have numerous cases where we adapt to the battery level so the user can get the best of our apps and not empty their battery while they still need it.</text></comment>