Android VoIP application: PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK vs ignoring Battery Optimizations (doze whitelisting)

Question

I'm working on a Voice over IP (VoIP) application using the SIP protocol which requires the application to be listening to incoming calls. This means the application must not sleep or die.

For old code, it seems the way to do this is to acquire a PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK.

Now from Android 6.0 and higher, there's the new Doze. It is recommended that, if you don't want your app to go to standby, you should "whitelist" it by requesting the REQUEST_IGNORE_BATTERY_OPTIMIZATIONS permission. This is specifically for VoIP applications according to the documentation.

These two different things seem to be related. I'm not sure how they are related, if they interfere with each other, if I should use one or the other or both, and if there are other considerations. Please explain.

Also, I am not allowed to use Push Notifications on this project. If you have other advice for saving the battery please let me know.

Answer 1

In your case looks like you should be asking for whitelist, as the documentation you linked, it advises that GCM can collide with the SIP protocol. I would handle this case like a typical runtime permission. On some place of your app(the on create of your main screen for ex) ask for whitelist and the reason why you need it, if they dont want just disable functionality related to receive calls.

You should only use one of them at a time, you can always do it the hard way and handle the voip calls without sip, then you could handle incoming calls with push notifications from your server, but i dont think someone is up to that unless you need a top tier product.

There is no workaround for this, indeed the only good way is to do the heavy lifting by yourself, because its kinda popular on users to use battery optimizators / improved doze apps so you could get killed anyway.