iPhone Ways to test battery life? iOS 12 vs iOS 13

[Populus]

Hello.

Soon I will update my iPhone 8 from iOS 12.0.1 to iOS 13.4 and before I do that I wanted to perform several tests on iOS 12 to compare them with iOS 13 afterwards.

My intention is to record them with my iPad Pro camera, and edit the video to share it with all of you.

So, let me know what kind of test can I perform to know how does battery life change between versions, aside from Geekbench and YouTube video playing. In the case of Geekbench, is the partial test accurate enough? Or should I do the complete drain test? Any other ideas are welcome.

And yes, I know after the update (it will be a DFU restore) I have to leave it to settle down for a few days to perform the indexing and stuff.

I’m open to new ideas that might allow me to more accurately test battery drain on real word scenarios. Thank you.

 

[Isamilis]

For some (or most?) users, including me, battery life is remain same with 12. Bear in mind that it really depends on your phone config & setup. I would suggest to start from install fresh if you really have to upgrade.

 

[Populus]

For some (or most?) users, including me, battery life is remain same with 12. Bear in mind that it really depends on your phone config & setup. I would suggest to start from install fresh if you really have to upgrade.

Yeah yeah, it will be a DFU restore and fresh install of the fewer apps. But still, I am curious and I wanted to demonstrate if there’s any battery life drop, to people who might be hesitant with the same decision.

That’s why I wanted to test it from 100% of battery to 0%, and perform different tests... I’m open to suggestions that might reflect actual daily use.

 

[cynics]

Benchmarks are designed to test computational power of raw data at a basic hardware level (floating point, crypto, etc). This helps to mitigate software influence of the benchmark.

Using the Geekbench battery test is a test to see how much data can be processed before the battery dies. The difference between iOS 12 and 13 will be features and background processes running since the actually test won't be influenced too much by software. The problem is the additions and changes to frameworks (the point of an iOS update) that streamline real world use are ignored. For example, having a really high OpenGL score is nice, but its pointless if your substantial usage is with Metal or encoding/decoding h265 video is very useful, unless you use h264 exclusively.

My suggestion would be making a Shortcut that loops task you would typically do in your everyday life and time it for both OS's. Part of the shortcut could even be a stopwatch/timer and/or alarm when a critically low battery level is reached. Best to do multiple runs then average them. 100% to 0 is required to account for inconsistencies with the battery meter. Also I would test a week or so after the update to iOS 13 so Siri (previous Spotlight) can build its database and iCloud can do its thing.

That will only tell you the overall OS performance (sum of its parts) which isn't very helpful though. An operating system is just the term used for the many processes used to accomplish the job of an operating system. Figuring out where the efficiency is gained and lost is more useful.

To help narrow down where efficiency was gained and lost you can use the Energy Log in the Instruments app on MacOS (included with Xcode) . You can also see which processes and apps were using various hardware.

Like mentioned iOS updates is when Apple introduces new frameworks and improves the old ones, same with API's. Apple tailors their hardware to run its software. Older devices have exponential loss in performance (computational and battery) with updates because the SoC wasn't optimized for frameworks and processes that are newer then the hardware running them. For example my iPhone 6S did most of the ARKit functionality via software which can be very heavy CPU usage. The iPhone would get hot and battery life would drop like rock. Conversely my iPhone 11 Pro Max has hardware dedicated to some of that functionality making it much faster while using less energy. The 11 stays cool and effect to battery life is minimal. With iOS 13 ARKit was updated and can be an even heavier load on the 6S without a noticeable difference to the 11.

TLDR: iOS 12 will likely have better battery life on older devices when compared to iOS 13 do the hardwares ability to utilize the software more efficiently. Without careful consideration of the test you plan on running paying heavy consideration a wide variety of task being used in a manor that represents real world usage testing this would be pointless.