ok well after some playing this app certainly polls. My phone, which typically gets me 2 days of light to moderate usage, went from 100% charge down to 7% in 6 hours. Additionally taking a look at the comments in the market you can see others are noticing it as well. The problem is a phone must function as a phone first, all other stuff is secondary. If the phone cannot maintain a charge, it's a $500 paperweight.
You have an awesome app so I'd like to make some suggestions and let me preface by saying i make them with all due respect.
- You really need to push not poll. This saves a ton on battery as the server is doing the heavy lifting and also means no need for a wakelock
- With the suggestion above it means you may need to adjust your business model. Servers come at a cost, you have the initial purchase, maintenance, plus monthly charges of running them (power, broadband). the way BlackBerry gets away with this is by indirectly charging the customer straight through the carrier. When you purchase a BB you get a nice little BB tax of $20 or $30 thrown onto your bill which covers monthly use of the push servers for such things as email and BB messenger. You cant do this, nobody would pay an extra monthly fee so you will need to think outside of the box.
a) look into using admob and putting adds into the settings menus and other non-intrusive places. This should hopefully cover some of the costs.
b) Charge for the app upfront (this is in addition to the ad's). Charge a buck or two at the time of purchase.
c) Make it more than just Liveprofile messages and text. Add in some other services to make this a must have app such as facebook chat or gtalk which would also be pushed through the server. People would buy an app with facebook chat that does push for that purpose alone! I suggested gtalk as well because of its deep integration to google, with android getting as large as it is, gtalk is becoming more and more popular. The current gtalk app that comes with android is push, works beautifully, and barely uses battery.
d) Maybe think of a way to create a group license package that you could market to large companies which could help bring in lump sums of cash plus the additional exposure to the ad's (point a).
here is a link to an article which you may find of value.
Again great work. I hope to see this with push servers in the near future because i can easily see this becoming everyones "must have" application.
