Aislelabs, a company based in Toronto that provides analysis and solutions in shops for building mobile shopping experiences, today released a report that examines how Bluetooth iBeacon battery technological impacts on Apple iOS vs Android devices. The study found that the framework iBeacon Apple first introduced with iOS 7 to make iOS developers take advantage of Bluetooth beacons for sending notifications based on location, actually works better with Android, at least when is the battery life:
From the table it is clear that Moto T represents the best performance of the battery. Comparing Nexus and iPhone 5 5 family (which has about the same generation chipsets BLE) the low number of beacons, we note that Nexus 5 is better (less) battery consumption. As the number of beacons increases the battery consumption becomes similar … Moto G, and new Android phones are extremely energy efficient using iBeacons. We believe that this comes from sampling lighthouse BLE chipsets used by these phones.
The report also shows that the newer iPhones work much better than previous generations probably due to a more efficient newer models that has been optimized for technology Bluetooth chip:
Table 1 shows the iPhone 4S consumes the most battery and iPhone 5S is the most optimized (new phones are more optimized chipset). As the number of markers increases, the phone uses more battery. With one headlight, and continuous exploration, 4S uses 5.75%, while the 5S battery uses additional battery of 4.25% compared to the baseline. As the number of beacons increase to 10, the extra battery drain for 4S and 5S becomes 11% and 4.75%. Obviously the new iPhone 5S consume only half of the battery compared to the 4S model when there is a 10 beacons nearby.
While Android devices seem to win when it comes to the battery life in most of the scenarios in the experiment, the report notes that Apple has a slightly different approach to the way it allows iOS to find beacons compared to Android . “Android enables scanning of all beacon signals in the background, but iOS restricts background search for a set of prespecified iBeacon identifiers (UUID).” This approach provides savings modest battery life compared to the method of Android in some cases, but the report says the latest Android devices application automatic sampling headlights are generally more efficient:
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Moto G, and new Android phones are extremely energy efficient using iBeacons. We believe that this comes from sampling lighthouse BLE chipsets used by these phones … Apple allows the developer to manually specify a list of marks to search as an attempt to save battery. Moto G on the other side makes automatic sampling without imposing a burden on the application developer.
The report makes clear that the experiment used continuous scans every second, but the results of real-life fall somewhere below 1% for all devices with average daily usage. “Note, while draining the battery for the iPhone 5S may seem very high in our experiments, this is not the case in real life. In our experiments, we are doing a browse every second for an hour, a sensible application real-life background scans are much less frequent in daily. iBeacon consumer applications should be no more than 1% over a period of 12 hours in real life situations.
Source: Report shows ibeacon battery drain is worse on Ios than Android
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