Not long ago, a message about "company leaders ask employees to send screenshots of mobile phone power consumption before leaving work" was swiped on many social platforms.
According to relevant reports, this is a method that the leaders of a company have come up with to prevent employees from "touching the fish" when they go to work. Obviously, it is an attempt to encourage employees to concentrate on work during work by checking the power consumption of mobile phones one by one, rather than doing unrelated things on mobile phones.
As soon as such a practice was exposed, it triggered a lot of discussion on the Internet. Some media believe that the enterprises involved "lack humanity" and the rough management methods cannot play the expected effect. Some netizens suspect that the company may have been mired in itself, so managers will be more strict in requiring employees to "concentrate on work". There are even well-known ACG websites that take the opportunity to "popularize science" to touch the fish, and have received many "is this river" response.
However, as a serious technology website, when we three easy life see this matter, what we think about is really not whether the practices of related companies have a human touch and whether they infringe on the privacy of employees, but another more realistic and more technical problem.
This seemingly simple problem is actually much more difficult to verify than everyone thinks. To do this, we found six different brands of models and spent a whole day doing a simple simulation test.
The test design is to first turn off the six mobile phones and fully charge, and then turn on at the same time at 9 am, simulating the scene of "long commuting", playing 1 hour of B station video in the hour between 9 am and 10 am, and then closing the video application and collectively holding the six mobile phones on standby.
By 12 o'clock in the afternoon, we lit up six phones at the same time again. At this time, the simulation is the scene of "brushing vibrato during lunch break", and six mobile phones run vibrato at the same frequency and at the same time for a full hour. Then close the app, clean up the background, and put the six phones on standby again.
Finally, at 18:00 in the afternoon, we talked about the collective awakening of six mobile phones, at this time we started Taobao, with "online shopping on the way to work" as a simulation scenario, on the basis of the same network environment and the same operation frequency, the six test machines were browsed for up to 30 minutes on the Taobao product page, and the relevant live video refresh operation.
Why do we design our testing process this way? This is because the theme of our test is "whether the phone power consumption screenshot can reflect the application usage time", not how much energy consumption each phone consumes and whether the battery is durable.
Secondly, it is not difficult to see from the three application power consumption scene time we designed, in fact, the simulation is to go to work "and do not touch the fish", but in the commute and lunch break, a large number of mobile phones will be used for entertainment. In other words, such use will make the mobile phone in a day, may have a lot of power consumption, but also bright screen and use of not short time, but these uses do not occur during working hours.
So the question is, from the screenshots of the power consumption of these six mobile phones, can you distinguish the specific application use period, so as to correctly determine whether the user is "touching the fish" at work, or is it only a "dependent" of a mobile phone during non-working hours?
Through the screenshot of the power consumption of the iOS 15.5 system, it can be clearly seen that it is used during non-working hours
In ColorOS 12.1, you can only see the overall power consumption, and it is impossible to determine the usage period of the application
The Flyme 8.1 system can only see the overall power consumption and cannot judge the usage period of the application
Unfortunately, at least from the test results we got from Sanyi Life, except for the iPhone (we are using an iPhone 13 mini running iOS 15.5 beta), the power consumption screenshots of the other five Android models cannot accurately determine the specific application usage time.
MIUI 13 can only see the overall power consumption, and cannot judge the specific usage period of the application
MyOS 11.5 can only see the overall power consumption, and cannot judge the application usage period
To paraphrase the example at the beginning of this article, that is, if you are using an iPhone, then its power consumption screenshot can indeed help you "prove your innocence", showing that you are not entertaining or online shopping during working hours, but if you are using an Android phone, then things may be more troublesome.
OriginOS Ocean can only see the overall power consumption, and cannot judge the specific usage period of the application
However, if you think that the Android system is not meticulous enough, in fact, it is just wrong. This is because in today's Android models, "mobile phone power consumption statistics" and "specific usage period statistics for each application" have actually been split into two completely different functions. In contrast, these two functions in iOS are only used in the same interface.
Nowadays, in the Android system, the application time statistics function is often referred to as "digital health", "application timer", or "screen time management", and the battery statistics function has long been "separated". Turn on this feature to see which time period of the specific app was used on which day.
The "Screen Time Management" interface of the Mimi phone MIUI 13 system can be seen and the battery level is completely separate
It is worth noting that in the vast majority of Android models, the "digital health" function is not enabled by default, because this function is considered to infringe on the user's personal privacy to a certain extent, so it requires manual authorization from the user to start working. This means that if you have never paid attention to this function before and have not manually enabled it, then the Android system will not count which application the user has used for how long at what time, and naturally it will not help the "hit worker" to prove his innocence.
Of course, it's not hard to realize from this point that the boss at the beginning of this article who asked employees to "send a screenshot of the phone's battery" to check his work attitude may have only been exposed to the iPhone himself. Ta did not know that the android system's power statistics function was actually completely unable to see the application usage period, so he made a decision that could be called "stupid and bad", which made himself and the company the target of criticism.
Does this also mean that some of these employees will be misunderstood because android models do not show the specific usage time of the app by default? We don't know that, but I hope we don't.
【The pictures in this article are partly from the network】