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Comment by yeetsfromhell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

Got some of that data?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%?

Same experience with my Pixel 3A as well. I charged it, every day and a half on LineageOS

same experience even with my galaxy S7.

Is that considered good? My Redmi lasts multiple days. I charge every third or fourth day under normal use.

Good enough for me. Without any metrics, I have no idea what to compare to.

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.

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.)

This mirrors my experience, but it does not invalidate the parent's statement.

Specifically: While iPhones are noticeably more power efficient than Android phones the latter have been sufficient for my usecases especially given that there are typically options with larger batteries.

> it does not invalidate the parent's statement.

I mean...without any metrics (from you or the parent) the statement is pretty hollow and doesn't mean anything.

I agree that quantitative metrics would make for a much stronger comparison than a few people's subjective experience using both kinds of devices.

In absence of that, even an anecdotal comparison seems more relevant than a statement that only considers one of the two items being compared.

Update: Because I was curious whether my subjective experience was backed by real numbers, I looked up the top few Android and iPhones with the greatest battery life as per the first website I found [1] and calculated their efficiency based on their battery capacity. Various iPhone 13 models used 3.1 to 3.6 mAh per minute whereas the Android phones used 4.0 mAh/min (Moto G9 Power), 4.2 mAh/min (Samsung Galaxy A03s, Realme 9 Pro), 4.3 mAh/min (Nokia G21).

[1] https://www.techrankup.com/en/smartphones-battery-life-ranki...

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.

The energy consumption when charging isn't the issue; it's all that extra mass of additional battery needed to hold the charge.

I don't mind a heavier phone at all. Especially if that means an improved device life until mandatory charge

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.

The majority of users need all battery capacity they can carry.

That’s their decision, not yours.

What? The power bill is not insignificant, it is irrelevant when talking about battery capacity. The size of the battery has no bearing on the energy cost. If the device consumes 2500 mAh per day, that costs the same whether the batter is 10,000 mAh or 500 mAh.

The downsides of larger batteries are increased weight, volume, and cost. Being more efficient gets the same battery life for less of those three, allowing them to either be reduced or the budget to go to other components.

Android OEMs constantly try releasing a bulky phone with a multi-day battery life, and it never pans out.

Xiaomi midrange phones are extremely successful outside of Europe and the US. They come standard with multi-day battery, headphone jack, IR blaster, microSD slots, multiple SIMs...

Hugely popular with people from mainland China. They are almost comically large though!

Xiaomi is the number one brand in Europe and India, and was the number 3 brand worldwide by unit sales in the year 2021. Xiaomi actually does the worst in its home market. It was the 4th largest brand inside China in Q3 2021, and it fell to 5th place in Q4 2021. See: https://www.gsmarena.com/strategy_analytics_xiaomi_is_the_to... https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-03-0...

As for Xiaomi being comically large, I found the mid-range Samsung and Motorola models to have larger bezels and to generally be larger for similar specs when I bought my Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 a couple years ago. The reality is that the majority of phones from Motorola, Xiaomi, LG and Nokia are designed and manufactured by 3 Chinese ODMs (Wingtech, Huaquin and Longcheer), and even 20% of Samsung's phones come from these 3 ODMs. See: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/comparing-l5-and...

What do you mean 'never pans out'? Devices like moto g phones with 5000mAH are huge hits.

My 180 gram Android lasts days.

What? The mid-range market of phones with massive batteries is dominating most of APAC markets. What are you talking about?

No one wants to carry around a 5000 mAh brick everywhere they go.

2900mAh iPhone 7 Plus battery is 41 gram. Is 20 extra grams too heavy for you?

The weight of a penny is too much for you?

There are the iPhone Smart Battery Cases. It's not the same as a full 5000mAh battery, that's true. But you can kinda get there. I'm also surprised they never released such a phone. Perhaps the production would be just too small for them to focus on.

Web sites review phones based on weight. Phones are designed for review as a higher priority than being designed for use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-).

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