For a while now, I’ve been keeping an eye on the “experiment” being conducted by Jason Kallelis, a longtime Android fan who recently grew so frustrated with the platform’s shortcomings that he switched to the iPhone 6 Plus. Roughly one week into his grand adventure with iOS, Kallelis has already found it does something significantly better than Android: It gives you a much more detailed breakdown of what’s consuming your smartphone’s battery.
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To make his point, Kallelis posts two separate screenshots from iOS and Android:
“iOS is kind enough to point out apps that are draining my battery in the background,” he explains. “When it comes to actually diagnosing why my battery might be misbehaving, nothing beats telling me which apps, specifically, are performing battery-draining background tasks. Even better, iOS gives me fine-grain control over which apps can do so. I quickly identified a few apps that I didn’t need refreshing their data in the background and shut the door on them.”
Speaking as a longtime Android user, I can’t agree with this sentiment enough. I would absolutely love to have an easy way to see which apps in the background are sneakily sucking my battery power dry while also giving me an option to shut this activity down. Kallelis notes that while Android provides the freedom for us to do this with third-party apps, Google should really design a way to do this right from our phones’ settings.
“iOS attempts to pro-actively protect the user from misbehaving third-party apps, while Android empowers the user to deal with it themselves – if they have the time and motivation,” Kallelis writes. “It’s the difference between standing guard in front of your house and warning you about possible intruders, or handing you a sword, walking away, and trusting you to learn to defend yourself with it.”
Kallelis’s whole essay is worth checking out and you should really read the whole thing yourself to get a better idea of some key differences between how iOS and Android handle battery draining apps.
