Indexing depends on battery health

[sans-c]

Ente Photos 1.3.7 (and probably below) pauses indexing based on "battery level, battery health and thermal status".

While I somewhat understand the rationale to pause on low battery levels, I suggest to give users a choice on whether they want indexing to be paused or not. Some Google Pixels for example have their battery capacity and charging speed reduced because of possibly faulty batteries. On such devices, indexing will never start/resume, until the battery is replaced.

I argue that enforcing safe and stable operating conditions is the OS's job and not that of individual apps like Ente. While in some cases a battery replacement is "recommended", it is by no means enforced and if you can live with reduced capacity, it's fine for the moment. The same argument holds for thermal status. I guess it's the job of the firmware to throttle if needed. Battery level is similar - I guess just respecting a battery saver mode is enough.

Long story short: Please consider giving users a choice on when and where they want to use a feature and don't take on OS-/manufacturer responsibility.

[ItsHarper]

I highly doubt Ente has written logic for that themselves. I see they are using WorkManager on Android (via the workmanager dart package), which allows the OS to decide when to perform background tasks.

In short, "enforcing safe and stable operating conditions is the OS's job and not that of individual apps like Ente" is almost certainly exactly how this already works. The text you quoted is likely just Ente's description of typical OS WorkManager behavior.

[sans-c]

In short, "enforcing safe and stable operating conditions is the OS's job and not that of individual apps like Ente" is almost certainly exactly how this already works.

I didn't dig too deep but it seems like battery status comes from a now archived project called battery_info and compute_controller.dart checks for battery health using that plugin. So apparently there is in fact Ente logic for deciding whether to compute or not. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

Note though, that various other apps report the battery as faulty aswell and it makes sense, because even the battery menu in Android says that a replacement is recommended. But a recommendation is not an enforcement and even Google apps happily compute whatever they have to without any complaint. Everything just works as usual - only capacity and charging speed is reduced in this case. I suggest that Ente does the same - at least as an option.

[ItsHarper]

Seems correct at first glance, thanks for checking me on that