Possible Corruption Issue with AVARE or Flight Pro

[AcroGimp]

Just a quick note, my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 that I use for EFB duties was showing extremely poor battery life and high operating temperatures recently. I tracked the issue down to the Media process, specifically the element that indexes and manages image files.

After a lot of web research and some careful consideration I removed AVARE and Flight Pro (formerly Avilution Aviation Maps) and the issue is gone. Because I was at wit's end I removed them both at the same time so I cannot determine yet which was the actual culprit but wanted to pass on the warning.

'Gimp

 

[chartbundle]

Avare, for reasons which make no sense to me, stores every chart tile as an individual file on the device instead of in a database like every other app out there. This means that your device could very well be spending much of its time scanning all these directories looking for changes. There is an Android 'hint' by putting a file called '.nomedia' in the top directory it won't scan them, but I have no idea if Avare is doing this.

 

[JohnSBA]

Note 8 that I use for EFB duties was showing extremely poor battery life

I've used Avare on a 1st gen Nexus 7, Galaxy S4, and Droid X. Even with the GPS on, Avare seems to sleep after a couple of minutes in background. It uses no resources at all when you Exit. In flight, it does tend to use more battery than just keeping the screen on, and of course more still with GPS on. I've flown it for several hours unplugged on each of these devices with no issues. I notice though that the N7 will slowly discharge even when plugged into a high capacity charger, but from what I've seen online that's an issue with many apps. Guess you could try Avare again and see if that was in fact your problem.

 

[JohnSBA]

Avare, for reasons which make no sense to me...

I asked the lead developer about this, and since he's not a subscriber here he asked me to post his reply:

Avare is actually doing this for efficiency reasons. That's why it runs well even on 1st gen Android devices like early phones. While all other apps use commonly available database based tile maps, Avare was done with battery efficiency in mind.

By keeping the files on the disk, and interpolating the tile names using simple neighbor math, Avare avoids database queries of huge tables that could take a lot of processing power. That applies only at run time.

This battery life issue is not related to Avare because when it's in the background it does not download any data, does not poll the GPS, and never checks for weather. There is virtually no network traffic or GPS polling. It's extremely low on battery use when inactive. Avare also places a .nomedia file in all its folders so that Android's media process is not fooling around with pictures.

Anyone with questions about Avare can get quick answers on the Avare Forum or check on the Avare website.