If You're Programming a Cell Phone Like a Server, You're Doing it Wrong

The design decisions you make early on will stay with you. How you treat "occasionally connected" users is likely to have some architectural impact. Keep their requirements in mind as you sketch out your application.

It doesn't have to be "every decision" if you architect the app to not do CRUD-over-mobile-data and do sync instead.

This not only improves battery life, it has a strong positive effect on perceived performance and interactivity.

Fortunately, there will soon be a book all about that (ISBN 1118183495).

If you are on Android, my guess is that your phone was set to be connected to Wifi during sleep. You can control it by going to Wifi networks section -> menu -> Advanced -> Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep, then setting it to "Only when plugged in" or "Never".

If you're driving around with the phone set to leave the Wifi on during sleep, it'll be constantly going in and out of range of various Wifi connections. If the Wifi part is set for passive scan, then the processor needs to be kept up as the Wifi chip attempts to collect the BSSID of all the network it see and processor tries to figure out whether these networks have been seen or not. If it's set for active scan, then the Wifi needs to power up the radios to transmit beacons. Pretty bad news in either case, unfortunately.

I work for a mobile operator, and have had to work on several network issues related to poorly designed apps. I agree with kintamanimatt on this, it's not premature optimization, you need to know the cost of what you're doing. There is an incredible resource cost, to all the naive developers making apps these days, that treat the wireless interface as an always on connection.

1. Server polling every minute We actually sent one customer an invoice for over $100,000 because they had a particularly bad application that polled a server every minute. This was only an internal app used by a few hundred people, but they used it at their office, and it caused constant blocking on the cell site covering their office. This actually broke cellular coverage near their office, and caused issues for all the other customers in the same area. Ultimately, we said, we can help you fix you're app, you can pay the invoice to upgrade cell coverage to you're office, or get off our network. In this instance, we helped them fix their app, so it only interacted with the server when something needed to be changed (the server pushed changes), which was actually quite easy to do. This simply isn't the same thing, as writing an inner loop in assembly, to shave off a few microseconds in runtime, which would be premature optimization, and actually making robust software that works well wherever it is used.

2. Synchronized network access This one has been the bane of us on a few occasions. If you write a network access to be like a cron entry, that run's not only every 15 minutes, but does so at exactly the same time between all devices. We get to hunt you down, and scream, as our wireless network crumbles. When every device, wakes up at the same time, and asks for a higher power state, at exactly the same time, the network will only process so many. The funny thing is, you'll test this yourself and not see anything, but then when you release your app, you might find 30% of those checks are failing for some reason, and struggle to figure out why. For any one who is thinking, well the operator should add more capacity, the answer is we do, but ultimately the customer pays for the network build.

3. High usage apps What happens is, your device vendor, is in the interest of protecting it's customers as well. We once had an app on our network, that would treat all reject codes, as a cause to retry. This caused it, to every time it was run, begin uploading data, over and over again, leading to thousands of dollars in bills to the customers for excessive data usage. The device vendor, pulled the app from their stores.

Now, how do you feel, about having to plead the case why you should be allowed to continue to sell your product, not only to the device vendor, but the carrier who found the problem, prove that you fixed it, have our bureaucracy test that you actually fixed it, and maybe if we feel like it, let you sell again. It's not as simple as fix the bugs, you might actually lose you're ability to make money of you're software, for months while this get's sorted out.

What do you think you're store rating will be, when all your customers get sent a $5000 bill for using your app?

Now the question is, should there be a better way, and I'd like to see more from mobile vendors, in making it stupid easy to be smart about this. In the phone API's, if I need to do a background update, I should be able to register with the OS, and say, I have an update to do, within the next 15 minutes, let me know when you have an active radio connection. You're phone goes into a high powered radio connection, and bam, all you're background updates now go out together. Need to send notifications, here is our push API, only interact with the mobile when an update needs to be done. If the API's you're using, are designed for mobile, and take alot of this network stuff that you shouldn't need to know into account, it's a lot easier for the naive developers to do better by blind luck.

-- * my views in this post are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer.