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Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. Linux on a laptop gets simi

• xvector 5y ago
  Android phones have terrible battery efficiency compared to iPhones. The only reason you don't notice is because manufacturers cram in massive batteries to compensate. Same with Linux/Windows versus Macs. It is only recently that Linux/Windows laptops have begun to approach Macs in terms of battery life, and their battery efficiency is still far behind, especially with Apple Silicon being a thing.
  • tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    Got some of that data?
    • jcheng 5y ago
      https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series-screen-power-battery-life-report-long-lasting-devices https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series... Platform Model Life Size Efficiency iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max 21.7 4352 4.98 iOS Apple iPhone 13 16.8 3227 5.21 iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro 16.6 3095 5.37 Android ASUS ROG Phone 5 16.6 6000 2.77 Android ASUS ROG Phone III 16.5 6000 2.75 Android ASUS ROG Phone II 16.2 6000 2.7 Android Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (S888) 15.9 5000 3.18 iOS Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max 15.6 3969 3.93 (Efficiency is just Life / Size * 1000)
      • unobatbayar 5y ago
        Never thought iPhone 13 has bigger battery than iPhone 13 Pro. It's almost as if they deliberately added this seemingly bad option so people would choose the most expensive option iPhone 13 Pro Max. Because it would seem like the best deal out of three. I mean the Pro Max is just $100 more expensive than Pro, right? But remove this decoy option, and most people would just buy the iPhone 13.
        • djsavvy 5y ago
          I see what you’re saying, and that’s an interesting argument. But a counterpoint: > On the iPhone 13 series, there’s a few complex behaviours to consider: First off, the iPhone 13 Pro and its LTPO panel noticeable decreases the minimum baseline power consumption of the phone by around a massive 100mW… While 100mW doesn’t sound much, when using the phones at lower screen brightness, this can represent a large percentage of the overall device power consumption, and vastly increase battery life for the new iPhone 13 Pro models. > Comparing the 13 to the 13 Pro, the phones have quite different curves – while the 13 Pro uses less power to display full white up until 140 nits, the regular 13 becomes more efficient afterwards. We’re also seeing different curve shapes, meaning the phones are driven differently in regards to their PWM and emitter voltages. The Pro phones are more battery efficient than the regular ones, and probably use the extra space gained with a slightly smaller battery for some other featureful hardware (cameras?). The trade offs made seem to be reasonable for a Pro that’s between the regular and the Pro Max. It doesn’t seem to me like just a decoy.
        • xvector 5y ago
          Literally everyone I know with a Pro owns the regular-sized Pro. The $100 is irrelevant to the target market of the Pro line, it's basically pocket change. You buy the phone that's most comfortable for your hand because that matters way more than the $100.
        • matthewmacleod 5y ago
          This makes no sense; virtually nobody is picking which phone to buy on the basis of 130mAh of battery capacity, and these are different devices to boot with different screens and cameras.
  • kop316 5y ago
    When I used a Pixel 3a with LineageOS, I recall never having to think about battery life unless I didn't plug it in overnight, and even then, it would survive just fine for a second day, it would just be at like 20-30%?
    • calvinmorrison 5y ago
      Same experience with my Pixel 3A as well. I charged it, every day and a half on LineageOS
      • sendilkumarn 5y ago
        same experience even with my galaxy S7.
    • lelanthran 5y ago
      Is that considered good? My Redmi lasts multiple days. I charge every third or fourth day under normal use.
      • kop316 5y ago
        Good enough for me. Without any metrics, I have no idea what to compare to.
    • Accacin 5y ago
      I used to have a iPhone 6S Plus and when the camera died, I decided I wanted a more private phone. I opted for the Pixel 4a 5G and installed Calyx OS. I absolutely love Calyx, and wouldn't move from it. However, the battery life even compared to my old iPhone 6S is pretty bad. I'm not even a heavy phone user, I don't use social media or have many apps sending me notifications (only Signal) and I feel like my phone can't even last two days of light usage. My iPhone I could use similary and I could usually get 3 days of usage.
      • RussianCow 5y ago
        How are you getting 3 days of usage out of an iPhone? I don't use my iPhone X much at all (mostly texting and occasional web browsing), but I'd be lucky if I could get 2 days out of it. Meanwhile, my last Android phone would consistently last 3+ days on a single charge. (To be fair, I ran LineageOS without Google Play Services installed, which makes a huge difference, so it's not exactly apples to apples.)
  • p1necone 5y ago
    I don't really give a damn about battery /efficiency/. I care about battery life. The impact on my power bill of charging up a 5000mah battery vs a 2500mah battery is completely insignificant. If Apples battery efficiency is so good they should release a phone with a 5000mah battery /as well as/ said efficiency and market their battery life that beats all their competitors by multiple days, I'm sure a lot of people would buy that in a heartbeat.
    • otterley 5y ago
      The energy consumption when charging isn't the issue; it's all that extra mass of additional battery needed to hold the charge.
      • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        I don't mind a heavier phone at all. Especially if that means an improved device life until mandatory charge
        • simonh 5y ago
          That’s what battery cases are for. There’s no need to weigh down a standard model with battery capacity that’s far beyond what the majority of users need. That’s more of a concern with niche phones that won’t get specifically designed battery cases, but for iPhones there are plethora of options.
          • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
            The majority of users need all battery capacity they can carry.
            • simonh 5y ago
              That’s their decision, not yours.
    • amarshall 5y ago
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    It's not like you're going to run plasma OS on your iPhone, are you? You're running the Linux phone OS on the androids with the big batteries. The point was that it's reasonable to expect the battery life of plasma OS and friends to be comparable to Android, similar to how Linux on a laptop is comparable to Windows.
    • kaba0 5y ago
      I may have misread your comment, but android’s userspace is so completely different from the usual linux one that is should not be compared like that at all. The former underwent thousands of paid engineer hours to improve battery life among others, it is no reason to assume that giving a mostly usual desktop DE a narrower screen will result in anything similar.
    • etbe 5y ago
      https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/ https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/ The Purism CSO has been running a Librem 5 as his primary desktop PC for over a year. When Plasma was first released I was probably running hardware slower than a Librem 5.
  • thrashh 5y ago
    I always thought that iPhones weren’t more efficient — they just dropped a major feature: running background apps. I remember being able to run Ubuntu in the background on an unrooted Android phone while browsing the Internet. You can’t do that with iPhone. That said, I rather have battery predictability over features, but I always thought that if Android dropped background apps, they would have the same battery usage as an iPhone.
    • kaba0 5y ago
      Both OS have a similar stance on background running processes - they kill them after a short delay. Iphones are more aggressive and consistent about it, and android OEMs sometimes give exceptions for their own bloatware.
      • izacus 5y ago
        For a long time Android was much more liberal in allowing job scheduling and it would allow apps to continue running permanently without restrictions. Unfortunately trusting developers to use those allowances wisely did not pan out.
      • etbe 5y ago
        Do you know of a good web site explaining how this works? My Android phone used to kill my Jabber client all the time until I got to using Conversations which has a notification all the time which seems to be the way to avoid being killed while running in the background. It would be nice to be able to reliably run background apps on Android. Also as an aside Android doesn't appear to reliably kill background processes, it kills them if it thinks that something else needs the resources. Running the Facebook app is one way of triggering Android to kill a bunch of background apps.
  • green7ea 5y ago
    My oneplus 8t gets 3-6 days of batterry life with lineageos depending on screen use. It lasted only a day before lineage. Android has great battery life, spyware doesn't ;-).
• hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Linux on a laptop gets similar battery life to Windows in my experience, and that's without using kernel patches and crazy settings, etc." Sadly I cannot confirm this for my 6+ different laptops I owned. And I tried all the crazy settings, grub, tlp, .. and even compiling the kernel myself. It is hard to beat loads of dedicated engineers, who are paid regular and well and have access to all the proprietary device information and even manufacturing. edit: maybe there was one time, when a linux stock install performed maybe equally than a stock windows install. But that was only because of the windows bloat, which linux does not ship. But I can easily remove most of the bloat, but I cannot just write a better gpu driver. But if windows continues its bloat path, it will be soon inferior despite way better drivers.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  >Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. I get two days of intensive use from my old Huawei P30 Pro.
• izacus 5y ago
  > Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. Linux on a laptop gets similar battery life to Windows in my experience, and that's without using kernel patches and crazy settings, etc. Google also invested a lot of time into optimizing battery consumption (which hackers and people like the guy from Commonsware derogatory call "War against background processing"). If you look up through history of Android releases, there isn't a single release where there would't be a pretty major change in how Android puts device to sleep and how it wakes it up again. That stuff is really hard since a single bad service can drain your battery in matter of hours and needs seriously tight coordination between all software makers on your device to avoid problematic edge cases.
  • blihp 5y ago
    It's more often a case of misaligned incentives than being all that difficult. When your business model (both Google's and most 3rd party developers) depends on constantly streaming telemetry from a device to a server you're going to have battery life challenges. Much of Google's effort has gone to providing decent battery life while still providing the telemetry. No doubt that a fair amount of effort has gone into specific use cases like background streaming audio apps (i.e. phone/music/etc) but the hours those take are a drop in the bucket compared to making the whole advertising ecosystem work (efficiently enough) on mobile.
    • izacus 5y ago
      The issues I've met when mentoring 3rd party Android developers had very little to do with any kind of telemetry and a lot to do with inherent laziness of "we'll just set a cron job to poll server on 2 minutes, it's easier than thinking about it" mindset. It's pervasive among the newly minted developers capitalising on the engineering pay gold rush.
    • etbe 5y ago
      My first Android phone was a Sony Ericsson Xperia x10i. With that phone I could go to sleep while playing music from the SD card and wake up 8 hours later with plenty of battery left. The same phone however would run out faster if doing stuff over Wifi or using GPS. It was mostly a matter of how much power different things took. One of the things I want to do on my Librem5 is monitor my servers, so that will involve polling things every few minutes. PowerTop says that I can save power by changing the polling for USB, but that changes Wifi ping times from ~1ms to ~350ms. Eventually I'll probably try experimenting with that to get an option with a 10ms ping time that still saves some power.