Thomas Künneth
Google Developer Expert for Android with a previous life in the Java Enterprise. Speaker. Mentor. Wrote a couple of books along the way.
Thomas fell in love with Android in 2009. He has been constantly contributing to the community since then. Thomas loves writing books (four titles, 15 editions) and articles. He enjoys speaking at conferences and meetups. Thomas' first encounter with programming was in the era of home computers during the early 1980s. Later came C, Perl and a few more. During the 90s he wrote a bunch of programs for the Atari ST series. The first decade of Thomas' professional career centered around Java Enterprise. Today it’s all things Android and Kotlin.
Waking Up Safely: Reducing Background Wake Locks with Android 17
How many times have you checked your app's battery telemetry and winced at background wake locks? For over a decade, exact background timing meant pairing AlarmManager with a PendingIntent. It works, but it brings a messy tail of heavy-handed intents and battery blame. Shouldn't there be a lighter way?
Android 17 introduces a platform shift: a variant of setExactAndAllowWhileIdle() that accepts a direct OnAlarmListener. But what about Doze mode? And more importantly, how do you architect a unified dispatch engine that leverages this optimization on Android 17 while gracefully falling back to traditional broadcast lifecycles on older Android versions?
In this talk, we’ll move past the basic method signature and dive into the mechanics of low-power background execution. We will look at how to safely bridge the cross-version architectural gap, handle edge-case process terminations, and restructure your sync engines to keep both operating system and batteries happy.