TouchWiz Launcher
Samsung’s new TouchWiz Launcher draws less power. The Vulkan API is used to enhance gaming and graphical performance on mobile devices. Samsung Galaxy S7 was the first handset to have featured Vulkan support. Since then, the API has become very important and many other devices have also added support for the API. Android N Developer Preview has now included operating system-level support for the API.
Vulkan API
While the API has been widely used to enhance gaming performance, Samsung is now using it to develop a new TouchWiz launcher. Principal engineers demonstrated the new TouchWiz launcher at SDC 2016. The new launcher not only enhances the performance but also boosts the battery life of your device.
The launcher is not yet production ready and it does not fully utilize the capabilities that Vulkan has to offer but it has showed very interesting results in the initial test cases. “TouchWiz-like” will be used to perform the same tasks as the current version of the launcher like scrolling pages and opening app drawers but at a lower power draw. The new launcher has the same performance as the current version developed using GL ES but saves 6% more battery than the current version.
You may think that 6% lower power draw is not significant at all. However, since the launcher is activated many times during the day the 6% lower battery usage is quite an improvement. Engineers at Samsung have noted that using launcher developed by Vulkan API will increase battery life of a 3600 mAh battery by 40 minutes.
These results from initial test cases are quite important as they show that the Vulkan API can be used in applications other than gaming and graphics. Samsung is not yet ready to roll out the launcher but these results suggest that the API could be used to develop other applications in the future.