I would like to see tests wrt this before I assume it--Apple puts a pretty hefty premium on battery life for customer devices, and while that would probably not win out when placed against this kind of liability minimization, they've got a lot of sharp folks there who crunch this stuff in their sleep.
I have been noticing increased background activity on my phone after it reached 100% during charging, for years now.
Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P computing device.
Nothing new really. And they can still keep their promise of a good battery life -- which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before (and sometimes during).
There are ways to achieve both -- good observable battery life plus ability to use your phone for P2P computation -- and it's IMO obvious that Apple has succeeded in that for several years now.
> which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before (and sometimes during).
I find this a bit shocking. Were all of these Android low battery devices?
I don't have a good point of comparison, as I've only used Android on phones, but there are a lot of Android devices with really large batteries and very long battery life. It'd be pretty amazing if iOS were beating them in the real world.
There's no magic in iPhone's batteries, they are basically identical to all others.
The secret sauce ingredient is the idle battery life. The Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40% battery when I was out and about without me picking them up even once. We're talking anywhere from 2 to 5 hours with them being in my pocket or a backpack, in the middle of a big city, with excellent 4G coverage, so it should not be a constant radio antenna activity (although if their antennas were of lower quality that might just be it).
I installed all sorts of root apps to try and pinpoint the culprit and inevitably hit a brick wall when all the apps can do is point at a system service without any way to drill down further.
In contrast, the iPhones that I've used -- 6S Plus, 8 Plus and 12 Pro Max -- are all extremely frugal on using battery when the device is idle. I've grown used to picking the phone from my bed at 100% battery in the morning on days where I had to do a lot of stuff outside, be out and about for 4-5 hours and only pick up the phone once or twice, and then get back home and find the phone at 98% battery.
As someone with an iPhone 12 Pro and a Galaxy S21 Ultra, swapping my SIM between each every ~two months; this situation has absolutely changed sometime in the past couple years.
Android's idle power draw, at least on the S21 Ultra, is fantastic. I'll sometimes leave this phone on, with no SIM in it but connected to WiFi, sitting on my desk, using it every once in a while for Tik Tok or whatever, and it'll last a week or more. The iPhone is pretty similar.
But display-on time, apples to apples; the iPhone has fallen behind. With the 12 Pro, most days I'll end at 5-10%. At least once every couple weeks, the day will end with the iPhone having already shut down. In comparison, on the S21 Ultra: I give it ~20-40 minutes of charge every day while I'm working, just unplug my USB-C laptop and plug it into the phone, and that's it. I don't charge it at night. Its battery life is ungodly; by the time I go to bed, its at 50-60%. Wake up, plug it in while I'm showering and making coffee, good to go.
I think you are aware that 4G radio can draw a lot of energy so that might be an unfair comparison with the iPhone.
A more objective test would be for both to have SIM, or both to not have a SIM. Then again, iPhones have objectively weaker batteries compared to a lot of Androids (as in, less mAh).
I am not claiming that there are no better Android devices nowadays btw; not at all. I'd be happy if the OEMs finally caught up with this nasty problem! I am only saying that back in 2017 -- when I finally lost patience with Android -- things were looking pretty bad for it and for me that was the tipping point that made go for iPhones.
Both the iPhone 12 Pro and S21 Ultra have 5G radios (though their usage here is probably 80% on wifi, 20% on non-UWB 5G most days).
My point is comparing their battery lives when they have the SIM in them. So, not which one lasted the longest yesterday, one with the SIM and one without, but rather comparing across time, how did the S21 (my current phone) fair today, versus how did the iPhone generally fair a few weeks ago when the SIM was in it. Not exactly scientific; just what I've observed and felt.
And the unscientific conclusion I've drawn is that the idle time is pretty similar between the iPhone 12 Pro and S21 Ultra, but the "active" radios-on SIM-in screen-being-used-all-day time definitely favors the S21 Ultra.
> I am only saying that back in 2017 -- when I finally lost patience with Android -- things were looking pretty bad for it and for me that was the tipping point that made go for iPhones.
You're 100% right; Android's track record has been pretty darn bad when it comes to standby time. But, I think its actually gotten a lot better. There are some reports that Samsung's Android flavors, specifically, are very aggressive when it comes to background app killing; that may be it (and, frankly, I don't notice any negative side-effects from it. if its happening, its transparent). Or maybe it was something more general in a later version of Android. Or maybe just huge batteries. But; something has changed.
> I am only saying that back in 2017 -- when I finally lost patience with Android -- things were looking pretty bad for it and for me that was the tipping point that made go for iPhones.
I'll respond to your earlier post too, but this is actually the answer that I was looking for. The Android world was a very different place back in 2017. The best battery life that I got out of an Android back then was an LG G2. I think that it was competitive with the iPhone, but many other Android devices of the era were not.
> I've grown used to picking the phone from my bed at 100% battery in the morning on days where I had to do a lot of stuff outside, be out and about for 4-5 hours and only pick up the phone once or twice, and then get back home and find the phone at 98% battery.
Is this true when the device is a year or two old? I've always found iPhone battery life impressive... but only until its about a year old or so. My iPhone 11 plus now requires nightly charging, or I will inevitably hit a Low Battery situation
I held on to my 8 Plus for little over two years and it remained excellent most of the time -- although I had to replace the battery before reselling it because it was at 83% capacity.
I also always charge my phone overnight even if it's at 70% (which it routinely is) because I've been bitten by going out and about with 60% charge and having to spend 12h outside and my phone died. So I just started conservatively charging it each night no matter what I expected for the next day.
But yes, for most people an iPhone can easily last two full days and still be at 15-20% when you finally plug it in on the second day's end.
iPhone batteries are only rated for 500 cycles of 100% -> 0%. Or, to look at it differently: You can charge 1 percent of your battery 50,000 times on your iphone before Apple no longer guarantees under warrantee that your battery will hold 80% of its original capacity.
Caveat: every percent is not equivalent. Charging above 90% is harder on your battery than charging from 40-50%. Charging and even just using your battery while it is very hot (90 degrees or above) or very cold (below freezing) is also very hard on it. Apple defines operating temperatures as:
> Use iOS devices where the ambient temperature is between 0º and 35º C (32º to 95º F)
and claims that using the phone outside those temperature ranges can permanently shorten battery life. Bit silly when you live someplace like I do where 60% or more of days are outside of that operating range, but I guess Apple is really just designing for Cupertino temperatures.
Basically after just 365 days of phone ownership, you're probably already over 50% of your way through your battery and capacity might be reduced by over 10%, up to 19% is still OK under warrantee. I've had a 2016 iPhone SE for over 5 years now, and I've replaced the battery twice in that time. Seems to be essentially required once every two years.
Yes, I agree with that. The two iPhones I had before the 12 Pro Max -- 6s Plus and 8 Plus -- seem to have needed a battery replacement at about the 20th month mark because the capacity was at ~85% at that point. And you being to notice. So yes, doing a battery replacement anywhere inbetween the 1.5 and 2.0 years mark for iPhones is quite expected IMO.
I've used my (original) SE for over 5 years, running it down to the 20% region (often way lower) and back up overnight at least 2000 times. Battery still seems reasonable - health on 79%.
May I ask where in the world you live? I wonder if part of the cause of your incredible battery longevity is a climate that stays safely within Apple's design specs of low humidity, moderate temperature. I've lived in areas that get very hot, very cold, and very humid regularly in the time I've owned my SE, which could contribute to battery degradation.
And above it all, batteries are very much a lottery. Sometimes you get a really great one, sometimes your battery falls apart within a year. I guess you got lucky.
Before I had an 11 I had an SE, and by year 2 or 3 the battery was so weak that I had to carry around an external charging pack for it. This got really awkward (and a little scary) for traveling and was part of the reason I upgraded to a newer model.
Right before I sold that SE to my friend I checked the battery health, and it was in the high 80s. Yet I could not get a full day's use on a single charge. This led me to conclude that that Battery Health measurement was bullshit.
Apparently if I enable analytics I will get a report saying how many cycles my batter has lasted. Unless I use my phone for several hours of playing spotify and youtube I don't notice the battery dying during the day.
> The secret sauce ingredient is the idle battery life. The Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40% battery when I was out and about without me picking them up even once.
I think Android and newer chips have mostly fixed this. The Pixel 5 on my desk right now has gone from 100% to 81% in the last 7.5 hours with 1.25 hours of screen on time during that period. Last week, I had a session of 18 hours with screen on of 4.5 hours that went from 100% to 34%. IMO, idle draw is likely still a little higher, but then again I run a lot of little background apps (eg, tasker, the pebble app, wear os connectivity and others).
Most of my previous Android devices wouldn't have fared nearly so well, even back when I cared enough to spend time trying to find wakelock culprits. Thankfully, I haven't needed to do that in years either. :)
It's really good to hear that wakelock hunting is no longer an expected practice. ^_^
I'm super interested in getting a Xiaomi (and modifying it enough so I can be reasonably sure that it doesn't stream all noise around it 24/7) at some point so hearing about how Android got better in this regard is exciting.
Yeah this. I’ll leave my iPad on my bed for 10+ hours and when I come back it’s lost maybe a percent or two of battery life. With my Android tablet I had it had to be on the charger constantly. My phones battery lasts about a day with all my apps on it, where my old android I had to charge mid day.
The ha-ha-only-serious joke when I was at a place developing for iOS and Android, so had tons of test tablets for both, was that the Android tablets would be completely dead after a long weekend (or sometimes just a normal weekend...) in a drawer, and the iPads would still have enough charge to do something useful, and still wake up effectively instantly, if you forgot about them for a month.
As for the phones, I find I get 2-day charge out of a new iOS device. After 2-3 years it's about as bad as a new Android. 10% low-battery warning, and put in low-power mode right at bed time? It'll still have enough juice for the morning alarm and some morning HN reading. I mean, I try not to rely on that, but it does work. Difference has got to mostly be the software & firmware.
> The Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40% battery when I was out and about without me picking them up even once.
That hasn't been my experience.
My current (very crappy) Mi A1 still lasts 3-4 days with moderate use.
I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. I don't even lose 15% of my battery life in 2 hours on my galaxy S3 without using it, and it is nearly a decade old at this point.
There are likely other factors that I can't account for because I was only using those phones in a single city -- with rare exceptions going to a rural area for 1-2 days.
Still, your anecdotal evidence does not nullify mine.
You might be biased? I have no axe to grind with any company. I am looking for what serves me best.
We don't have a perfect option, sadly. I evaluated Android quite fairly, for about 5 years, and found it lacking. I find the iPhone lacking as well, but in departments that I care less about.
Do with my posts what you will, I'll only say once that I have no bias either way. IMO both sides of the duopoly suck... but I do need a smartphone. I picked what served me better at the time.
I don't think its fair to say your are speaking in bad faith either. I had similar experiences with some older devices (Nexus One, Galaxy S2, etc). There was a long period of time when Android devices were really bad on battery, even with relatively large (for the time) batteries on board.
Does the expression "anecdotal evidence" ring a bell to you?
I am glad that you got lucky. I had both a Galaxy S4 and Note 4 and both were completely awful on idle battery life; both barely lasted a day in the office with 30 minute commutes in both directions, and no more than 2h of active screen time, if even that. And I had like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr installed at the time. And Gmail. That was literally all I had installed on top of the stock ROM.
I don't get why are you coming here insisting that your experience somehow nullifies mine. That is what I'd call not arguing in good faith. I didn't do anything more except share my bad experience with Android (which is now severely outdated because it ended in 2017) and never claimed anything more than that.
> Does the expression "anecdotal evidence" ring a bell to you?
Read the guidelines.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
I've got an older Moto X4 and it consumes 2% per hour when in my backpack. I guess the only remarkable thing about the configuration is no social media apps.
Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P computing device.
They already do, the feature is called “Optimized Batter Charging”. It charges the battery to 80% and only does the full charge a bit before you usually start using the phone. You’ll find the setting in the battery health section.
> they can freely use it as a P2P computing device
Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just making up something that sounds good to you?
More likely it's doing the background on-device work that Apple has actively advertised for a long time, like analyzing photos to attach metadata to them. (There's a lot more to this than is obvious at first glance - I can text "penguin" or "sunset" in my Photos.app library and get a set of matching pictures back, for example.)
You reckon I would know of a way to gather an exact evidence unless I work for Apple? (In which case I'll likely be convicted and thrown in jail as well.)
Obviously I can't know for a fact. I also thought they likely analyze photos and that's my chief suspect even now. But critical thinking demands to keep an open mind -- and that's how I suspect they might use fully-charged iDevices (that are expected to sit on the charger for several more hours) for unsolicited and non-advertised P2P computations.
Yeah, sure, I can brute force encrypted traffic by eyeballing it in my router's dashboard UI. Come on, dude.
You seem to have an axe to grind here and I refuse to participate. I even objectively admitted that I can't know and that I only suspect yet you (a) offer a non-solution and (b) likely downvote a comment because you don't like it.
I have owned nearly every premium phone on the market and none of them come close to the Sony Xperia for battery life. I try new iPhones every other model or so...battery life has never been outstanding.
Do you disable Background App Refresh? First thing that I do on every iDevice. That feature being on is hugely overrated, you absolutely don't need it because you enter an app and manually refresh it; what's the big deal with that, are people that lazy?... Gods!
(The only useful application of that feature is email apps, I suppose; you do want to have your messages downloaded when you unlock your phone because Apple Mail takes ages to sync with Gmail... and it only gets worse with time.)
With that option set to "on" the idle battery life might quickly take a nose dive if you have stuff like Facebook / TikTok / Snapchat et. al. installed.
