Smartphone battery performance remains a key consideration for many consumers making a new or upgrade smartphone purchase decision.  For many buyers, knowing they can get a full day of use before having to charge their device is a critical consideration in their purchase decision.  The good news is that battery performance is improving – various methods of optimizing battery use, such as processor power optimization, reducing background running apps and limiting screen brightness all play contributing roles.   However, some devices still tend to perform better than others in actual, real world measurement.

The chart below provides battery performance metrics based on actual consumer use among AppOptix panel members in 2019.  We chose to select a series of Samsung devices observed in our AppOptix panel for 2019 as they are both the most dominant devices in the market and demonstrate the type of battery improvement we’ve observed over successive generations of devices that have become more powerful, larger, and used more, in terms of minutes, than their predecessors.  While battery performance doesn’t demonstrate a linear performance improvement (not for example that the S8 and S8+ seemed to have better performance than the S9 devices respectively)the trend

A few caveats to note. 

• First, we recognize that battery performance tends to decline over time.  Given some of the devices reflected in our table have been in circulation for a few years, the data we are extracting on these devices is not based on equivalent battery age across device. 
• Second, while our extrapolations of battery performance tends to be more linear in nature, the reality is that not all battery performance is linear, and varies by many factors, including what network it is on, distance from base stations, environmental impact from interferences, and many other issues.  However, we have consistently applied the calculation process to those devices that are currently in use by our panel members in an effort to gain some insight to what they are currently experiencing given the above mentioned issues.   

Directionally, battery life appears to be keeping up with the continued increase in overall average daily data consumption and minutes of use while smartphones have continued to gain larger screens and more powerful processors.  However, there have been limited quantum leaps in performance, meaning that getting much better than a full day of charge appears to not be quite on the short term horizon. With increases in video consumption via apps such as YouTube, Netflix, and various other OTT apps that are video intensive the importance of the battery to consumer decision-making cannot be underestimated.