Update – Sadly, after thinking this had fixed it, I’ve since had the app crash or force close again. Read my more recent post on the situation.
I’m lucky enough to be using the Huawei P9 at the moment. It’s my main device and as part of my upcoming review I’m doing all the normal things I’d do with my phone.
Yesterday, at 6AM, I stuck it in my shorts and went on a long-overdue ride over Cannock Chase. There was ground-frost and, despite the popularity of mountain biking there, we were there only people over there. I’d downloaded Strava and recorded the ride to get there, back, and everything in between. The bit in-between is the two trails, called “The Dog” and “The Monkey”. By the time I’d got to the first one I’d warmed up and could actually feel my fingers, so I properly attacked the first trail and got – so I thought – some great times.
Trouble is, I’d forgotten about the power management on the Huawei P9 and the way it can cause problems with fitness tracker apps. This is present on Honor and other Huawei devices too. Out of the box it does make a significant improvement. I can prove that as it’s currently on 72% at 1PM. For me, that’s impressive. However, it achieves this by stopping and shutting down power-intensive apps through the “Battery Manager”..
It really doesn’t like things running when your screen is off, especially if you’ve not explicitly allowed it to run.
Head to Settings, then Advanced Settings and you’ll find the Battery Manager controlling this. You’ll also find something called a “Power Usage Firewall”. Here you can see all the apps that are currently using the battery more intensively.
Strava is on here as you can see above, but if it’s not running then it won’t be displayed. In that case, head instead to Settings and then Apps and click on Stava, then click Battery and you’ll see the problem …
Here you can see that I’ve got no power usage prompt set (even if I had, it could be that I’d accidentally told it not to appear) but – even worse for an app of this nature – it’s set not to run when the screen is off.
This is just crap really, as it means that your Stava logs are going to be pretty short and will stop frequently. Here’s how mine turned out, and I was a bit miffed to find that none of my “good bits” had been logged…
That long straight line connects the point at which the power saving closed down Strava to the point where I either woke the screen by accidentally tapping the power button or when I checked the time and turned the screen on that way.
So, if you’ve not already answered the screen prompt and allowed the app to run in the background, go via the Settings -> Apps and change it to “Run when screen is off”, or in Settings -> Advanced Settings add it to your “Protected Apps” list like this…
The end result should be less swearing when you get home from a long run or ride. Luckily I was too tired and achy to get that annoyed about the Battery Manager killing my Strava recording, but it is something to remember if you get a Huawei phone or any other handset that closes background apps in order to save battery. When you get it right and set up the power profile / firewall to only run selected apps with the screen off, it really does make a big difference. So, although this was a bit annoying, the mere fact that my super-heavy phone use hasn’t killed the battery by 1PM is evidence enough for me.
Personally I’d like a central database that perhaps has apps that need to be omitted as default when systems like this are used.