iPhone battery, notifcations, push and background tasks (unedited)

I'm one of the lucky ones who decided not to update their iPhone 5 as Apple's updates came rolling in. It doesn't require a genius either, just prior experience. I've had my share with iPhone 4s and never ending up dates never fixing anything. Only with 4s we weren't so lucky as to get a version 1 working as well as in iOS 6. To be precise I stayed with iOS 6.0.1, the one preinstalled on the first day of iPhone 5 availability in Austria.

As I'm reading hundreds of pages posts on Apple's own discussion forums and boards all over the web I'm finding it more and more foolish to ever recover my 1GB or so of space where the latest 6.1.4 system software update resides. The preferences badge is annoying, yes, but so is battery drain in standby.

And then I keep reading the suggestions of bloggers and other magazine editors for conserving battery that are slightly off.

# Notifications and Push

Apple's notification service is the best battery conserving solution around. Battery drain from notifications results from

• ## getting the display lit up for a few seconds
• ## keeping a single IP connection active for the push service
• ## getting the phone to beep/vibrate when the notification comes in

Other than the above, there's no battery drain. The single IP takes almost nothing, screen and beeps as well. So forget what you read, I suggest.

Apps can be fully closed, or never started for notifications to work because they don't need them. All this is in the developer documentation on notifications, but unless the app is active all notifications are handled by iOS only, don't use almost any memory or battery, are limited in nature (text and character length).

# Mail.app notifications

Things seem different for iOS's own mail.app which actually initiates connection to the mail server and loads the textual part of email data. In other words, using the gmail app and APN will actually reduce energy footprint.


I wish Apple would be more open with their energy consumption profile for different services/applications so that users would be able to make informed decisions. Not just turn off GPS, turn off Siri, turn off diagnostics, and on and on the list goes. Date and time seems to eat a lot of energy itself and turning off the automatic updates there may help some, but again, why do we have to reverse engineer this? I wish Jailbreaking was an option, but with closed source who is there to vouch for what's actually done to your phone?