Would a SB Widget (like clock, weather, etc) generally increase battery drain?

[talkin73]

Just installed ivent theme and like it quite a bit. I enabled the LS Clock widget in Winterboard and it seems like my battery is dropping much faster. I changed to this theme from another and noticed the battery drain but haven't installed anything else. Got me wondering if the widget is active in the background all the time or only when the springboard is visible or some other variation... not really sure how the code is written for those but curious if widgets are a known cause of battery drain? Could the way it was written by the developer have more or less impact on battery drain (ie; if not written well battery might be more effected)?

 

[sherlock]

Yes if it has weather on the LS - SB it will drain the battery a bit. They are usually set to check every 15 minutes or so. You can edit that in the coding.


Sent from an iPhone4s with Tapatalk

 

[talkin73]

Yes if it has weather on the LS - SB it will drain the battery a bit. They are usually set to check every 15 minutes or so. You can edit that in the coding.

Thanks! Sounds like you are saying a modest drain on battery but nothing dramatic? And, if I'm using a clock widget only, that would be unlikely to impact battery?

 

[Ipheuria]

What sherlock is saying is the drain will depending on the polling interval that the theme or widget is set to pull the information. The widget pulls the time, weather, etc. from the web so it uses the Wifi or data radio and the more frequent the polling interval the more of a battery drain it will be. The longer the interval is, 30 minutes vs 15 minutes the less severe the drain would be. This also depends how strong your signal is wherever you are at the time it's polling if the radio is searching for a signal just like any iPhone this will eat up battery.

 

[talkin73]

What sherlock is saying is the drain will depending on the polling interval that the theme or widget is set to pull the information. The widget pulls the time, weather, etc. from the web so it uses the Wifi or data radio and the more frequent the polling interval the more of a battery drain it will be. The longer the interval is, 30 minutes vs 15 minutes the less severe the drain would be. This also depends how strong your signal is wherever you are at the time it's polling if the radio is searching for a signal just like any iPhone this will eat up battery.

That is helpful to know. I would not have suspected that a clock widget would be polling the internet for info but, rather, simply using the system time on the phone internally. I'm disabling the widget for awhile to see if I get any change in battery performance.

 

[redbeard]

I don't buy it, it shouldn't be any more a drain than a push notification, I've had multiple widgets for years now and never saw any drain from them unless it had a bug or was poorly written.

 

[Ipheuria]

I had excellent battery life on my iPhone 4 JBen then once in the past I put this awesome lock screen that had an analog clock that like the OP I thought was simply using the system time. Well my battery life was attrocious after. I removed the lock screen and my battery life was back to it's excellent state, it might be some and not others depending on how they are put together but I def believe it and have experienced it.