Nokia kills off controversial battery tool in favor of Adaptive Battery

Adaptive Battery shipped with Android Pie, using machine learning and other techniques to balance performance and battery life. Now, HMD Global has confirmed that it’s ditched a controversial battery management tool in favor of Google’s solution on its Nokia phones.

In a post on the Nokia Phones Community forum (h/t: r/android), HMD revealed that it used the proprietary Evenwell battery management solution on its phones before adopting Adaptive Battery.

“When our devices that launched with Android N or Android O originally upgraded to Android 9 Pie, we started to gradually disable Evenwell while carefully monitoring end user feedback,” a company representative noted on the forum.

“Now we have completely disabled Evenwell from our legacy devices so even if you see the solution there, it does not do anything. On our new devices launching with Android 9 P (or later) releases we do not have Evenwell at all.”

Evenwell gained notoriety in January 2019 after the Don’t Kill My App website listed Nokia and HMD as the worst offender when it came to aggressive battery management.

Nokia was the only brand to receive a full five thumbs down rating at the time, with the website saying Nokia phones killed background apps 20 minutes after the screen was turned off. The website added that white-listing apps doesn’t help matters either.

Fortunately, HMD has since rolled out a black-list approach to its phones in recent months, and this move means it’s now sitting at four thumbs down instead (behind Huawei and Samsung). The black-list approach presumably means all apps can run rampant by default and that you have to specify which apps should be killed.

Have you noticed a difference in app behavior on your Nokia smartphone? Let us know in the comments!