[daniper]

Lol, we did these lab tests before we thought of turning what we learned into a post (if we had really been strategically content marketing, we wouldn't have posted this at 8 pm on a Friday night haha). Mostly, we wanted to break open an iPhone — that's what happens when a hardware team is in TGIF mode ;-)

In any case, it's not just background apps updating. Although yes, that's part of it. We wanted to learn more beyond what the iOS battery-monitoring feature will give you -- which is which apps are consuming which % of your iPhone's battery, both when you're actively using them and when they're running in the background.

For our own purposes, we were particularly interested in the interaction of location services and Bluetooth-LE which are required for own product to be useful. We threw in general "futzing" and screen brightness as well out of curiosity. And while our team knew that trying to connect to towers & routers ate your battery a lot (easily observed by just turning your phone into Airplane Mode -- can last for weeks!), we had no idea it could be as much as 250 mA every few seconds!