Re: Notes of June 30 teleconference

On July 1, 2016 at 12:38:11 AM, Dominique Hazael-Massieux (dom@w3.org) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since we were only 3 on the call, I've taken quick notes rather than
> formal minutes:
>
> * after discussion with the Director, the likely next step for Battery
> will be to publish an updated Proposed Recommendation (Dom in charge,
> pun intended)

Mozilla's DOM Team is considering removing the Battery API from Gecko
because of the recent abuse by companies like Uber [1] - and because
of a lack of credible set of use cases. Abuses like that harm users
and the credibility of apps in general. Or, if we don't remove it, we
will likely just get it to return the equivalent of "full" or
"unknown".

Since we (the WG) started working on this API, the OS landscape has
changed significantly: when we started, OSs were not doing a great job
with battery management, and we thought it would be a good idea to
allow developers some control. However, this change in recent years
with better battery/power management at the OS level (e.g., MacOS and
iOS have special battery saving modes that operate at the OS level
after a certain threshold is passed - like 20% on the phone, and 5% on
a Mac... I'm sure Android and Windows probably have similar features).

As such, we should consider not making it a recommendation at all and
just scrapping battery entirely.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/uber-knows-when-your-phone-is-about-to-run-out-of-battery-a7042416.html

Received on Friday, 1 July 2016 05:59:56 UTC