Are Service Workers Draining My Battery?
summary
Empirical claim: service workers do not meaningfully change energy use across devices and networks. Researchers run seven PWAs from PWA Rocks on Huawei X26 and LG G2, toggle service worker on/off, simulate 2G and Wi‑Fi, and log power with a profiler across 448 runs. Results show no consistent energy penalty or win from service workers, with variability by device and network but no systematic drain, so PWAs’ caching and push features are usable.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:29Who's speaking?
- 2:19The Green Lab
- 3:41Development strategies
- 4:21Fragmentation
- 6:01Web-based hybrid apps
- 6:58Progressive web apps (PwAs)
- 7:30The journey of a PWA
- 8:21Components of a PWA
- 9:22Service workers
- 10:07Offline-first experience
- 14:28Experiment design
- 18:01Measurement infrastructure
- 19:07Results - devices
- 23:22Results - network conditions
- 26:44Results of manual review
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