Aislelabs, a Toronto-based company offering in-store analytics and solutions for building mobile shopping experiences, today released a report examining how Apple’s Bluetooth iBeacon technology impacts battery life on iOS devices vs Android. The study found that Apple’s iBeacon framework, first introduced with iOS 7 to let iOS developers take advantage of Bluetooth beacons for sending location-aware notifications, actually performs better with Android, at least when it comes to battery life:
From the table it is evident that Moto G depicts the best battery behavior. Comparing Nexus 5 and iPhone 5 family (roughly having the same generation of BLE chipsets) at low number of beacons, we observe that Nexus 5 depicts better (lower) battery consumption. As the number of beacons increases, the battery consumption becomes similar… Moto G, and newer Android phones are extremely power efficient when using iBeacons. We believe this comes from beacon sampling on BLE chipsets used by these phones.
The report also shows that the newer iPhones perform much better than previous generations likely due to a more efficient Bluetooth chip in newer models that has been optimized for the technology:
Table 1 shows that iPhone 4S consumes the most amount of battery and iPhone 5S is the most optimized (newer phones have more optimized chipset). As the number of beacons increases, the phone uses more battery. With a single beacon, and continuous scan, 4S uses 5.75% more battery whereas 5S uses 4.25% extra battery compared to the baseline. As the number of beacons increase to 10, the additional battery drain for 4S and 5S becomes 11% and 4.75%. It is evident that the newer iPhone 5S consumes only half the battery compared to the 4S model when there are a 10 beacons nearby.
While Android devices seem to win out when it comes to battery life in most scenarios in the experiment, the report notes that Apple takes a slightly different approach with the way it allows iOS to scan for beacons compared to Android. “Android allows for scanning all beacon signals in the background, but iOS restricts background search to a pre-specified set of iBeacon identifiers (UUIDs).” That approach does provide modest battery life savings compared to Android’s method in some cases, but the report says newer Android devices implementing automatic sampling of beacons are overall more efficient:
Moto G, and newer Android phones are extremely power efficient when using iBeacons. We believe this comes from beacon sampling on BLE chipsets used by these phones… Apple lets the developer manually specify a list of beacons to scan for as an attempt to save battery. Moto G on the other hand does automatic sampling without imposing a burden to the app developer.
The report clarifies that the experiment used continuous scans every second, but real-life results fall somewhere under 1% for all devices with average daily usage. “Note, while the battery drain for iPhone 5S may seem very high in our experiments, this is not the case in real-life. In our experiments, we are doing continuous scan every second for an hour, a sensible app in real-life in the background scans are a lot less frequent. Daily consumption with iBeacon applications should be no more than 1% over a 12 hour period in real-life situations.”
The full report is available from Aislelabs here.
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WHAT?! How is this possible?! iBeacons were designed FOR iPhones…
“iBeacon” is just a fancy term for “Bluetooth Low Energy” and is based on the standart Bluetooth 4.0 specs. Apple might have pushed it more than Android/Google, but nothing prevents an “iBeacon” module to speak to an Android, since, well, its just normal Bluetooth.
It’s the same as saying “Airport was designed FOR Macs”. Not it wasn’t, it’s just another term for WiFi which has its specs as well.
Oh. I understand now…
Not exactly. iBeacon is Apple’s special method of using BTLE beacons. Apple packs specially formatted data into them so that, combined with a central registry, devices can identify and locate themselves and other devices. BTLE only provides the basic building blocks of this system.
@Graham, yes, that is protocol specific, but nothing special. What drains the battery and uses energy is now “what” is transmitted, but “how”, and the “how” is part is in the specs. A bluetooth package is transmitted the same way all the time (depending on the version and protocol used). The only way apple could achieve a special mode,would be by designing their own bluetooth chipdesign
Remember that this isn’t important, as it isn’t a real-world test. Even the authors say so: “Daily consumption with iBeacon applications should be no more than 1% over a 12 hour period in real-life situations”
Use low-power BT in a way that is as high-power as possible and you’re bound to get pointless results.
Why does this say Android? Where is Samsung, HTC, LG and Sony?
reason being iPhones have a smaller battery so this is a stupid comparison
I was wondering if this is the case. Hard to go more in-depth perhaps. But it could be the same amount, just on smaller batteries the percentage is more.
No it’s a valid comparison.
Iphones need more power on a smaller screen to do less than what Samsung provides on a larger screen.
I can go more than a day of heavy use on my S5.
Maybe Apple needs to pay closer attention …
If you had any scientific proof or facts then what you say could be accepted. Unfortunately you don’t, you say whatever you think, without knowledge or facts.
iPhone 5S has 1,600 mAh battery, and Moto G has 2,070 mAh battery. If you do the math, the battery comparison conclusions hold true even on an absolute scale as well. The reason the charts are prepared using % numbers is because thats what the end user cares — how much battery is left in my phone.
“Moto G processes only around 25% to 33% of all signals giving it a clear advantage when it comes to battery life. This means, given 100 beacon advertisements, Nexus 5 decodes all 100 received signals whereas Moto G only decodes 25-33 of them.” — But the battery life is great.
agreed. Moto G is awesome
So, this boils down to, “When we configure the phones with unrealistic settings we can show that iOS is worse than Android.”
I particularly love the caveat at the end, “while the battery drain for iPhone 5S may seem very high in our experiments, this is not the case in real-life.”
Yeah, mostly pointless study.
My comment was rejected because it contained the word butt?
Guess not. :P
This is not about how big the battery is or how long the battery lasts. This is about how power efficient the phone is (how much energy consumed at any given moment). If these 3 Android phones have a more specialized BLE chip in them, then it stands to reason they would most likely be more power efficient. But they do _not_ represent all Android phones, so that makes this article’s headline inaccurate or at least makes this study inconclusive.
Can’t tell from the article, were the test preformed with iOS 7 or 8? It mentions that iBeacons were introduced with iOS 7, but not what the test was preformed on. Just curious.
“Note, while the battery drain for iPhone 5S may seem very high in our experiments, this is not the case in real-life. In our experiments, we are doing continuous scan every second for an hour, a sensible app in real-life in the background scans are a lot less frequent. Daily consumption with iBeacon applications should be no more than 1% over a 12 hour period in real-life situations.”
Exactly. What iBeacon needs to poll every second of a whole hour. That is ridiculous.
Apple’s battery for the iphone sucked anyway.