Considering how expensive these things are, when you figure out how much of their long-term battery lifespan that you’re going to burn by having them on for no good reason while you’re sleeping, unless you’re on call for some reason, it does pay to turn them off and to turn off Wi-Fi, BT, and cellular data when you don’t absolutely need them (unless you’re on Instagram and Facebook all day!). We have a home landline and a computer or two is almost always on somewhere - and I do all transactions by e-mail, not texting, since it’s more conducive to archiving and searching, etc. I also found with a couple of early versions of Microsoft’s idea of an Always Connected PC that Microsoft did not have its power management act together and while you thought the device was just idling on the lowest power standby, it had decided to connect to the Internet and got stuck in some endless power-consuming fiasco. So after finding the Li-ion batteries on a couple of $1,000++ devices completely drained a number of times (not good for long-term Li-ion battery life), I said to heck with Connected Standby, I’m turning stuff that I’m not going to use for a good while off. Li-ion batteries even in an OFF device will sometimes drain as much as a few percent per month. So even old devices that I’m keeping as a potential backup, I have a regular every few month schedule of checking what’s going on with the battery and making sure it hasn’t self-drained (I lengthen or shorten the checking schedule based on my experience with the device in storage).
Don’t know about Apple, but I have also had the experience with app developers going over to the Dark Side on Android. Back around 2011, I really liked the battery monitoring app Battery Widget+ by Elvison-it was probably the most highly rated battery app at the time. But as time and updates rolled by, the developer decided to introduce ads, requested all sorts of unnecessary permissions, and the app got a bit out of hand. When I recently revived my 2011 Galaxy Nexus as a podcast player (again, why burn battery on a $1,000 phone for that when an over-the-hill old Android phone in your pocket works just as well?), I discovered, “Whoa!? Who turned on the Wi-FI when I wasn’t looking?!!” Turns out one of the permissions I had granted Battery Widget+ during an update was total control of Wi-Fi behavior. So hopefully given all the positive press, you can probably trust your iPhone a lot more while you’re sleeping but at least with an Android phone, you might want to check what’s been happening to your permissions with your updates and what your phone is doing from time to time when you leave it alone. Oh, yeah, I checked. Battery Widget+ is long-gone from the Google Play Store, too.
