Scheduled Checking Anomalies

[amingle]

This is a minor, but wanted to see if I was missing something.

First, my settings in "Mail, receiving" (hopefully I'm getting all the pertinent ones):
Scheduled sync is checked
Mail check interview set to 30 minutes
Time reference point 12:00AM
Settle in delay set to None

I also have Night set to 10:00PM - 8:00AM, with Skip Checking Mail checked.

Here is the behavior I'm seeing:
The app does a sync at 8:00, as expected. Then often during the day I'll look at the last synced time, and it will be something like 10:09, or 10:23, or some weird time that isn't an "even" half hour (10:00, 10:30, etc.).  The app will still check on the hour and half hour, in addition to these "weird" times.  Essentially rather than checking only twice an hour, it checks 4 or 5 times an hour.

I feel like several versions ago it did it "correctly", only syncing on the even half hours.

Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks for a great app - one of my favorites on my phone.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Samsung device with 4.4 or newer?

[amingle]

S4 with 4.4.2

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Samsung's "optimization" in their flavor of Android 4.4 (and later), which directly contradicts Android documentation.

Time based events can trigger before specified time.

Not an oversight, an intentional change.

http://developer.samsung.com/forum/board/thread/view.do?boardName=General&messageId=261443

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=69525

[amingle]

Interesting - thanks.  I apologize if I missed that explanation elsewhere.  Good call terming it an..."optimization".  Learn something new every day.

So from what I can understand, there's nothing I can do to change the behavior, correct?  If anything, there would have to be a change in the way the app fundamentally schedules syncing, right? (Please note: this isn't something I'm requesting, I just want to make sure I understand things).

[Kostya Vasilyev]

It would have to be a fundamental change -- such as requesting "repeating" time based events, which don't always happen on a fixed grid (e.g. 0:00, 0:15, 0:30 etc).

Or I could run sync operations through Android's "sync adapter framework" -- what you see in system settings / accounts.

Right now Aqua puts its accounts there and asks Android to update "last sync" time, but otherwise, has its own way to execute the various mail sync tasks (on multiple threads, with priorities, cancellations, etc. -- and I think I've done better here, for my purposes).

As far as workarounds -- I spent two months chasing it almost exactly one year ago, and ended up nowhere.

Samsung wanted to make those changes, and so they did.

That they contradict Android developer docs, or actually end up causing worse battery life -- apparently wasn't a concern or just didn't occur to them.

And trying to get Google's attention went nowhere too (I was hoping they'd add a specific test for this in their acceptance test suite, which vendors have to pass with their flavored Androids).