Netbirdio/netbird: Connect devices into a single private WireGuard mesh network

The reason is that we've broken the Internet such that all connections require keepalive about every 30 seconds. Otherwise NATs and stateful firewalls "forget" the connection and it dies and must be renegotiated. So if you have, say, 10 actively linked peers on your network you must send 10 packets every 30 seconds to keep links open.

Then you have all the other peers constantly sending keepalives to you. Since clocks are not globally synchronized it means you are constantly transmitting and receiving.

Phones can only seem to have long battery life due to aggressive power saving measures including turning off radios when not in use. Constant P2P traffic prevents the radio from sleeping and consumes background CPU. On devices with large batteries like laptops it's barely noticeable. On desktop and cloud it doesn't matter at all.

Mobile devices are really only suited to be dumb terminals to access the cloud. The problem is mostly in the architecture of the network. It can't easily be fixed in software.

Edit: one conceivable fix would be the introduction of an ultra low power side channel specifically for small and sparse "control" messages, but I don't see mobile carriers working on such a thing. For 99.9% of mobile users the use case is to scroll TikTok.

The other fix would be a protocol to tell NATs and firewalls about active connections, but that would also require cooperation across vendors and so it won't happen. People who think NAT matters for security would freak out too.

At least for me, it's even worse. It's not enough to disconnect on the app, as it's still connected as far as iOS is concerned (check Settings -> VPN). I tried many things to fix that - force-closing the app, switching it off multiple times in settings, etc. The only thing that actually makes the VPN to disconnect and the battery drain to stop is to choose a different VPN profile in Settings.