Metzee runs in your phone’s browser today, so what is using your battery is your browser playing live video — which is one of the most expensive things a phone does.
That is not a defect being blamed elsewhere. Decoding a video stream keeps the screen on, the radio busy and the decoder working continuously.
What actually costs power, in order
1. Watching a live show. By a wide margin. An hour of live video will cost you more battery than a whole evening of browsing listings.
2. Screen brightness. Watching video at full brightness roughly doubles the cost of watching it.
3. A weak signal. A phone on one bar of 4G spends far more power than one on wifi, because the radio keeps reaching. This is the hidden one — watching a show on a poor connection is much more expensive than watching the same show on good wifi.
4. Everything else. Browsing, bidding, paying — negligible.
What helps
- Watch on wifi where you can. Better picture, far less battery.
- Turn the brightness down. Live auctions are not cinema.
- Close the tab when you are done. A backgrounded video tab can keep a connection alive.
- Do not keep two shows open. Two streams is two decoders.
- Set a maximum bid and close the show, for the one item you actually want. The app bids for you, up to your number, with nothing running on your phone. That is the single biggest saving available and it costs you nothing. What a maximum bid is
That last one is worth taking seriously. Sitting through an hour of video to defend one bid is the expensive way to do it, in battery and in attention.
What does not help
Turning off notifications. They cost almost nothing, and they are how you learn you have won something with a payment window running. Switching them off to save battery trades a strike for a rounding error. How to change which notifications you get
If it is draining when you are not using it
Then it is probably not Metzee. A browser with no Metzee tab open is not doing anything for us. Check your phone’s battery screen, which lists what actually consumed it — that is a real measurement rather than a guess.
When the app ships
A native app generally handles video more efficiently than a browser tab, so this should improve. It is not available yet, and nothing you install from an app store today is us. Do I need the app?
More: the app is using a lot of storage, video is buffering, what you need to watch a show.