How real time live tile in Battery Status 10 works?

In recently published Battery Status 10, Windows 10 version of Battery Status, I added one experimental option. It is option which enables refreshing tile and lock screen notifications/background when battery percentage changes – in real time. I don’t want to go into technical details here. I just want to tell a bit about it from a user’s perspective, so people understand why it is not perfect.

This options uses a background task that is working all the time in the background. There it listens for changes in battery percentage. Such background task has some limitations. What will be important for you is:

1. On a phone there can be only 2 such background tasks at the time. If you have other apps that use similar technique then they may be in conflict. To give you an idea what other apps can it be – main use of such continuous background tasks is for reading sensors data and accessing peripheral devices.
2. On full Windows such background task can work for only 10 minutes – so it wouldn’t be possible to create such tile on tablet or laptop which have full Windows.
3. Such task can be terminated by system for various reasons, for example:
   1. Free memory is low so system wants to free some resources.
   2. App itself is terminated – it may be also because of low memory or some other system policy – in such case this background task is also terminated. Please note that in this case tile will continue to refresh every 15 minutes or when you plug-in or unplug your device. Background tasks responsible for this are different and unaffected by app termination.
   3. You restart/turn off you phone. Task is also killed here and has to be restarted after turning on the phone (you just have to open the app).

I think that gives you an idea how it works. From my tests this option works fine for few hours to few days, depending on what you do on your phone. Usually it was 1-2 days for me. Good news is that I added notification which informs you when this option stops working. When you click the notification it opens the app and the option is immediately enabled again. I wanted to simplify things for the users here as much as possible.

Lastly, option is disabled by default as it is experimental. To use it open the app and go to options (expand app bar) -> Live tile -> select “Update tile on every percent change”.

You can download Battery Status 10 here:

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