Some protocols support mechanisms for reducing bandwidth usage—and hence power usage, on mobile devices—when the user is not directly interacting with their IM client. For instance, Google Talk's XMPP server supports queueing incoming presence updates at the client's instruction; the client can instruct the server to deliver all outstanding presence updates at a later time. This interface may be used to instruct the connection manager to enable and disable such protocol-level features when a screensaver is activated, the device screen is locked, and so on, by calling the SetPowerSaving method.

Enabling power saving SHOULD NOT change behaviour in any way that is noticable to a user not actively interacting with their client. For example, delaying presence updates somewhat is unlikely to be noticed by a user not staring at their device waiting for a contact to come online; on the other hand, requesting that the server queue incoming messages would be noticable by the user, so is not an acceptable effect of calling SetPowerSaving.