Android versus iOS tablet power management when sleeping?

I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed this… whenever I wake up an iPad that has been asleep and unused for, say, a week, it still has substantial battery life remaining and is immediately ready to use. Anecdotally, however, the Android tablets either have dead batteries or have shut down so completely that they need to reboot and aren’t available for about 30 seconds (Google Nexus 7).

Is iOS much better about this than Android?

[Separately, I have two wireless access points in one apartment, separated by a brick wall. They broadcast the same SSID and use the same password. As one walks back and forth in the house, Android devices (Galaxy S3, Nexus 7) are very good about connecting to whatever happens to be the stronger base station (as evidenced by the signal strength bars at the top of the display). An iPhone 4S running iOS 6, however, is much more sluggish and often is struggling to get a handful of bits through an access point on the other side of the house, even if placed almost next to the other access point.]

11 thoughts on “Android versus iOS tablet power management when sleeping?

  1. I’ve also noticed the lousy sleep battery life with a Galaxy Tab 2 (10″). If I start with a full charge and read for an hour or so a night, it’s dead by the third night. Yet on the occasions when I’ve used it continuously, it’ll hold up for several hours.

  2. J: That’s kind of a dirty secret in Android’s closet, then, isn’t it? The reviewers who write glowingly about each new device would never encounter this issue. They get the shiny gadget, plug it in overnight, test it for 5 hours the next day, and then write an article on how great it is before returning the device to the manufacturer.

  3. It’s the result of Apple imposing more stringent limits on what applications can do in the background, and having an app store review process with teeth to enforce it. There’s a reason why the most popular utility category on Android is app killers – all those apps needlessly wasting cycles in the background take their toll on battery life.

    On the flip side, it does mean there are some useful things that are not possible on iOS because they don’t fit in the 10 use cases Apple permits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#Multitasking

    There is one other dirty secret to Android, which is the level of control Google ceded to carriers and manufacturers in order to get traction, which is why carrier-branded phones have so many carrier crapware cluttering the home screen and flash memory, without the possibility of deleting them. Not quite as bad as the Windows 8 RT Surface tablet (32GB of flash means 17GB usable due to preinstalled Microsoft bloatware), but still annoying.

  4. Fazal: I don’t think I can blame third party apps for this. The tablet is a Nexus 7 with no impurities from the manufacturer. I didn’t install much on it besides the Amazon Kindle app.

  5. There’s just a heck of a lot more going on in the background of Android. I know with my Android phone, the battery life that is left when I turn it on again heavily depends on what applications I ran right before I shut it off. My iPhone had no such similar problems.

    There is one game I use that will just eat the CPU, to the point that the phone is warm even if it is “off”. Now, sure you only have manufacturer supplied apps, but how often do they check for updates? Have a little RSS widget or a weather app on the home screen? How often do they check for updates? If a number of those are hitting the network while the tablet is “off” that is still a lot of battery usage.

    I think iOS hard shuts down apps to a much more stringent extent than Android does.

  6. You can set Wi-Fi to turn off when in sleep. This will improve Nexus 7 battery life, although not to iPad’s level.

    Settings > Wifi > options menu (three dots on the top right) > Advanced > and change “Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep”.

    https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/ZUyaTb9HwBz

    For the phone, having WiFi on when not connected to WiFi seems to drain the battery more than when WiFi is either off or connected.

  7. Android has a setting: disable wifi when screen is off. You don’t want that with your phone because you want bing-bongs when an important email arrives, etc. But with a tablet youl leave lying around with it’s face covered, try enabling this. Background apps should start less eagerly when there’s no network they can use to check for updates.

  8. There are a whole lot of devices that don’t roam channels on the same SSID well. I have a wi-fi extender/bridge in my basement, and then two APs upstairs (one is “outside” in a porch that was made into a “room” – but still has brick wall leading to the interior). Every once in a while the extender will end up on the AP that has 50% signal/noise instead of the one with 90/90, and I have no idea why, but that trait is not at all unique to apple devices. More devices do not offer a ‘if it’s below this number, consider it unusable’, and they should (But I have unlimited data on the iphone, so I would prefer using the LTE signal instead of the 30% wi-fi, but not everyone is the same)

  9. I’ve noticed the same issue with wifi performance on all my iOS devices. The iPhone 5 seems subjectively better than the 4 or 4S (4S was worst) but still much worse than my wife’s Android.

  10. Did you find the power usage graphs on the Nexus 7? I don’t have much time on mine and can’t refer to it, but I found them easily. It seemed to include very detailed info on which apps were using power. Interesting info.

  11. A5 chips runs at 800 Mhz in 4s. It has lower
    wattage than plain vanilla ARM chips.
    Nexus 7 runs at 1.3 Mhz with quad cores.

    4S has 512 MB while Nexus 7 has 1 MB RAM.

    IOS has dynamic drivers which load and unload on demand.
    IOS has no virtual memory and no user loaded background processes.

    4S came a year earlier so its battery capacity should be lower than S3.

    Apple has had special software in their battery that can do
    1000 cycles in their laptop battery so they are doing something
    to do with stand by performance.

    For ipad mini Apple was able to use 16 Whr vs 25 Whr battery in ipad 2.
    that is 60% reduction with same usage numbers.

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