Question

I have a VOIP app that I would like to always run in the background to make it responsive to incoming calls. Reading through some forums I found running the app in the background would cause a battery drain.

Are there good practices that I should follow so as to run the app in the background?

Answer 1

Reading through some forums I found running the app in the background would cause a battery drain.

It is more that having something run all the time increases your opportunity to drain the battery.

Are there good practices that I should follow so as to run the app in the background?

Being a VOIP app already violates some of the “good practices”. For example, you will need to (try to) have a service that runs forever, to maintain your open socket connection to the VOIP server. And, depending upon how your networking is set up, you might need to try maintaining a WifiLock, which will drain the battery.

Generally speaking, then, you just want to make sure that your service is doing as little as possible except when a call is in progress. For example, while you may need to send packets over to the VOIP server periodically to keep your connection alive, try to do that as infrequently as you can.