Diving into M: Battery menu adds new “ignore optimizations” setting

During its announcement of Android M, Google touched on how battery optimizations would play a role in the next version of Android. While they specifically touched on things like Doze mode — which puts your device in a deeper state of inactivity when you haven’t used it for a while — we also have just stumbled upon a new and potentially interesting option in the “Battery” settings menu.

As you can see in the screenshots above, Google has added a new ignore optimizations option. Looking a bit deeper, it gives you the power to authorize any app to ignore these optimizations: “Don’t apply battery optimizations. May drain your battery more quickly.”

While we can’t say for sure exactly what this is all about, we can certainly make an assumption or two. From the sounds of it, you can select which apps you want to ignore M’s new battery optimization settings, which would presumably let them run faster/better than with the optimizations on, but at the cost of additional battery drain. We’re sure there’s probably a bit more to it than that and we’ll be sure to attempt to dig a bit deeper in the days to come. If we can learn more about this new option, we’ll update this post accordingly.