The battery is a precious commodity, many are now realizing that they are tied to video calling or telework related applications, applications that are constantly updating, receiving notifications and working in the background.
As we well know, many government entities are betting on the launch of mobile applications to monitor the population and thus control the pandemic that we are currently experiencing with more accurate data. Nevertheless, in Australia the conflict between the application against COVID-19 and the users' battery has already been unleashed, Is it really worth betting on these technologies?
First of all, we have to mention that Australia has decided to launch this application that has already been downloaded to two million devices in the country. This application is almost entirely based on the version that Singapore made available to its citizens called TraceTogether. Now the problems arrive, iOS closes those applications in the background that make use of Bluetooth and other types of functionalities in order to preserve the privacy of users, and this causes users to constantly open the application for it to work properly, which causes especially high battery consumption.
Apple has already said it on occasion: "You should not completely close the apps in iOS, that consumes more battery since you have to start them again, iOS manages multitasking independently". This does not happen for example in Android, where the system is not so radical with this type of running applications in the background. Therefore, it seems that the most logical thing is to wait for Apple to launch its own version or continue to consume especially high battery consumption using these government applications in order to do our bit against COVID-19.