Quote:
Originally Posted by krohnjw
Well, if the app is polling on any sort of interval for hardware status or other info then it will use resources (the amount of resources used will obviously depend on the hardware being queried). If it is truly sitting idle and only operating on its own data set or info then it shouldn't be using any additional resources by merely being open.
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Exactly and any programmer worth their salt would not have their software polling unless it actually needed to do so; off hand I can't think of many apps sans email, IM and automatically-updating data programs that would need to do this.
But browsers, file explorer, RSS readers that aren't updating, Twitter apps that aren't auto-updating, Outlook, Netflix, etc. don't do this as far as I know. In fact it should seem obvious which apps do truly "run" in the background and those that don't do anything.
Edit: Here's a good example direct from MS on coding of Widgets, battery life and what they strongly suggest to preserve power; this is why I think modern programs on a moder OS don't impact battery life when idle.
- Only consume network resources when your widget is active.
- Minimize animations when the widget is idle.
- Cache data locally as aggressively as possible, use the widget persistent storage as a repository since it will be preserved across runs (and even upgrades).
- Be aware of the current battery level and minimize network operations when the battery is running low.
- Always (and by that I really mean always!!) use asynchronous network requests.