Want Better Battery Life in iOS 6? Turn off tracking!
iOS 6 brings with it a whole bunch of new bells and whistles – 200 of them to be specific, but since installing the latest update, there are reports popping up about degraded battery performance or excessive battery drain affecting not only iPhone 5 users, but also those running an iPhone 4, 4s, iPad 2 or the new iPad (why couldn’t they just have called it iPad 3?). On the iPhone 5, users have reported that LTE seems to be draining their battery while others seem to point the finger at Notification services and specific apps like Whatsapp for the poor battery performance. On my 32GB iPhone 5, I was also noticing less than ideal battery life and after writing up the review of the iPhone 5, I found an ‘interesting’ option listed in Settings -> General -> About -> Advertising called ‘Limit Ad Tracking’.
Don’t ask me why it’s buried all the way in there when one would think it would be located under Privacy. There’s also no indication as to what exactly is being ‘limited’ and why you can’t just DISABLE ad tracking’ completely but either way, I’d recommend turning this to ON! Further digging however, turned up even more ad tracking options that seem to be enabled by default and which might also explain the less than stellar battery performance people seem to be experiencing.
Head back to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> System Services (once again it’s located right down at the bottom) and within System Services, disable Diagnostics and Usage, Genius for Apps, Location-Based Ads and Traffic. Seeing that the Maps app is unusable at the moment, it doesn’t seem to make sense to have your phone constantly trying to pull down traffic information for your current location. If you really need traffic information, give Waze a try – I’d say it’s at least ten times better than anything else I’ve played with and you can't beat the 'police road blocks' feature :)
So what about the battery life? Well, I’m happy to say, that since turning off the options above, I have seen battery performance improve substantially. Before, I was getting something like 4 – 5 hours of usage and 6 – 8 hours of standby and this has now jumped to 7 - 8 hours of usage and 16+ hours of standby. In ‘real world’ terms, that works out to being able to unplug in the morning at 06:00 and not have to reach for the Lightning cable till well into the evening. This is with pretty moderate to heavy usage throughout the day of Twitter, Facebook, some gaming and surfing, all done over 3G as well as WiFi with Bluetooth turned on, Location Services enabled and the screen brightness set on auto.
Needless to say your battery mileage may vary, but if you’ve upgraded to iOS 6 and find that your device seems to run out of juice a lot quicker than it did in 5.1.1, perhaps it’s worth taking a look at disabling those services mentioned – and if it doesn’t, at least be thankful you’re privacy is at best a little bit more secured, though, security researcher and vulnerability assassin, Nikita Tarakanov had some interesting ‘food for thought’ on Twitter: “@L33tdawg: You think if you turn off something in GUI, real tracking stuff will turn off? Don't be naive, man!” Touche.
