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Last year, amidst the controversy of Apples alleged planned obsolescence they developed a series of actions to try and deal with this to regain confidence both with their investors and with the public.

They released a series of statements which they put on the front page of their website to explain the actions they had taken, particularly in relation to battery life of their mobile devices.

It was alleged they had programmed their devices to run down and decrease performance so that people would upgrade their devices more frequently, therefore increasing their profits and wasting resources.

Amidst these actions was new software related to battery consumption and usage in individual mobile devices and to give people the opportunity to review their own battery consumption and performance.

It’s actually been possible to do this on an iPhone for a considerable period of time, but it has been improved and upgraded with some interesting side effects.

It’s now possible to go into the battery usage of your iPhone and check which apps are consuming how much battery, either in background mode or inactive mode in the past day or the past 7 days. The picture attached to this blog shows my usage over a 7-day period as I wrote the blog.

For people with an iPhone this is an amazingly simple window into how they live their life and what their electrical device consumption looks like. As you look down mine, 42% of the battery usage over a week is background activity for Garmin Connect (a sports analytic app which relates to my exercise) BBC News and BBC Sport. I use those as a quick flick for the things that I’m interested in; like a little bit of pop culture really. 12% of my usage over a week is phone usage related to calls and 6% relates to messages. Another 6% relates to audible which are the audio books I listen to when I walk my dog and walk to work. 4% is headspace (mindfulness app) and safari is 4% together with Strava which is the other analytic and cloaked social media app that I use for exercise. Finally, 4% is a personal hotspot and tethering on my phone which I use when I’m on my laptop generally while the kids are swimming. The rest are incidental.

If you read these pages regularly you’ll know there has been much endeavour on my part to reduce my consumption on mobile devices in particular in relation to social media and interaction of that nature. When I looked at this I was delighted to see that almost half of my phones battery life and activity are taken by background app power uses when I’m not on the phone, the other half is stuff that I find pretty acceptable to me and I’m happy that I’m using the device now for the way that I want to and not allowing the device to use me.

The other analytic though in this app that is interesting is the amount of time that has elapsed since your phone was last fully charged up.

Normally I charge my phone every 2-3 days but that is a telling statistic – the more you have to charge your phone the more you use it.

The final interesting thing is that this is just my phone.

I have an iPad and a laptop, lately the iPad has been used more commonly as I watch television programs when I’m on my bike in the shed doing easy steady winter bike rides or preparing for presentations.

It just gives us an insight into how much of our life we have given away to these devices as I think back to the time I came to Nottingham for the first time in the mid 90’s and I didn’t even have a mobile phone.

What did I spend the empty moments doing then?

If you have something addictive on your phone like Facebook or Instagram I suspect the carnage is much worse.

Blog post number: 1556