by Living where I do I’ve never really been fully able to appreciate enhancements made to the iPhones battery life either in terms of bigger batteries or more efficient apps. Even lower power mode doesn’t tend to help that much purely because I spend most of my time with 1 bar of 3g signal.
If I check my iPhone now by heading to settings -> battery i’ll often see the main cause of sucky battery life is a poor signal but just recently some apps hae started chomping through battery life and my experience that of ZDNet.
Before I list the ZNnet list of battery killing apps here are mine from the last 7 days
Safari 21% / 3.3 hours on screen
Sounds good to me, I’m a heavy safari user and again Id bet this isn’t helped by way of a poor signal where I work. The longer it takes for data to come down the tubes the more processing safari has to do in terms of waiting to complete rendering the page.
Apple Mail 14% / 55 mins screen – 3.1 hours background.
Ouch. Thats painful by any extent of the imagination.
Netflix 11% / 1.5 hours on-screen.
You can blame DareDevil Season 2 streaming over a 3G connection for this. Despite being slightly overloaded, season 2 kept the amazingly high standard throughout just like season 1.
Overcast 7% / 16 mins screen – 5.9 hours background
Marco Armet has made great strides to make overcast more battery friendly however looking at my 24 hours its 7 minutes on-screen – 1.7 hours background hitting 22% of my battery
Opinion 10 mins screen – 8.2 hrs background
This is a real WTF moment. I use opinion to upload and host “the rampant mumblings” podcast. For an app that downloads the show from Dropbox and then publishes to Opinion in the space of 15 minutes, well that’s worth a tweet to the developers.
Over to ZDNet and surprise, surprise guess who’s at number 1.
Facebook – I doubt that anyone is surprised at this. To get around Apple’s backgrounding technology baked into iOS, Facebook would play silent audio in the background ensuring it was always updating itself.
Google Chrome – Strange this as Google has swapped from their own custom rendering engine to that of webkit, or so the story goes. I tend to stick to Safari purely because of key chain and google already knows enough about what i’m doing without being on my iPhone.
Twitter – polling for tweets in the background takes it toll and the more users you follow the harder the hit on the battery.
Google Maps – No surprise here when you consider the mix of data and continual GPS usage. Try Apple maps, it’s gotten better honestly.
Skype – You might think this is one of those obvious choices and yes it is when running in the foreground. It’s when it’s eating the battery in the background where an eyebrow is raised. Yes you could disable background updates but then you’ll only be available when using Skype and that might defeat the point for some. Try getting your friends to use iMessage or Facetime instead (incidentally why does everyone use Skype for calls on podcasts instead of facetime audio?)
Whilst the conclusion is pretty obvious it still brings up an interesting point to check on your battery life every now and again to see what apps could be causing less than optimal battery life.
Consider turning off the background app refresh setting if you don’t mind a small delay when loading up an app.
To find out how your apps are behaving, keep an eye on the battery usage information (Settings > Battery).
Article inspiration (ZDNet)
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