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by yamtaddle 1317 days ago
Some of it's the software being much better. See also: Android vs. iOS battery life. Android's gotten a little better over the years (for a good long while the difference was comically huge) but it's still the case that you need higher specs and a bigger battery to achieve similar apparent responsiveness and battery life with Android. And that's despite iOS bloating pretty badly over the last half-dozen versions.

Or see what happens when you use Chrome or Firefox instead of Safari on a MacBook. One of these three vendors plainly cares a lot about battery life. The other two do not care as much.

2 comments

To be fair, one of these vendors has also access to undocumented APIs that the others need to discover and reverse engineer to level the playing field:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsi...

It's not quite "reverse engineering" if you just need to read the kernel code (which Apple publishes).

It's undocumented, yes - but it's not like it wasn't there.

Good luck submitting your app to the App Store if you use undocumented APIs
Yes, thank you for this stunningly original comment. Nobody in the history of the App Store has ever dealt with this block, and this entire chain is definitely not about macOS specifically - which doesn't require using the app store.
> Android's gotten a little better over the years

By breaking background services more and more with every release. By doing less, your battery lasts longer, but for what if you want to make use of that battery? (I'm an Android user because iOS is simply not an option for tinkering, but I am sour about the breakage with every version.)