[harry8]

Phone runs a wireguard vpn client, uses pihole to perform dns lookups [1]. I haven't noticed anything being slower with the vpn on vs off and using whatever the mobile phone company provides for dns. Pihole deals with that page well.

Wireguard is pretty great.

[1] I configure pihole to use a local unbound installation on the same machine but you don't have to bother with that at all https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/

[Daviey]

I also use Wireguard (and also Tailscale), but the battery impact is significant such that I only use it when specifically need to. How do you find the impact?

[harry8]

I'm pretty new at iphone, like 3 weeks.

settings->battery claims that it uses about 10% of my battery in 10 hours, or about as much as less than 20 minutes of firefox use.

I previously had an ulefone armor 9 which had vastly better battery life with a 3+ year old battery after switching off battery saver hacks and making no effort eg running wireguard 24/7, than the iphone 15 pro, which kinda sucks pretty hard. Struggles to get through a day. No idea how much of that is my fault. Settings claims basically none of it is, but can it be believed?

iPhone is super expensive for a device that does so many fundamental things so incredibly badly with fixes that must have been obvious for a decade. One example of many is the sheer idiocy of silent mode. My nokia 20 years(?) ago let you set it to silent for 2 hours so you weren't stuffed if you forgot to do it manually when the thing was over. Not iphone. iPhone pings when you go to bed and put it on charge when it claims to be in "sleep mode" which is just idiotic. Sucks if your partner was asleep and that's why you wanted it silent at that time. No way they haven't got feedback on that after what, 15 years of iphone? I took them a decade to replace the old silent mode switch that changes position to silent accidentally all the time for elderly relatives so I guess that's some kind of improvement but wow.

Oh before people take it personally, android sucks. And those are our only choices other than no longer participating in society.