Network Extension battery usage issue

Question

AndyCheng OP

Created Feb ’17

Replies 2

Boosts 0

Participants 3

Hi ,

I have developed a network extension app, and I turn on its VPN all day. As a result, I found that the app is in the first place of the battery usage list. In last four hours, that app consumes about 22% (shows on screen 1 minute). The second place is Facebook App (14%, shows on screen 39 minutes, in background 25 minutes). Why my app consumes much more battery than Facebook? It seems weird and unreasonable. Could it be that all the network traffic is handled by our network extension app?

Does somebody have the same experience or know how to improve the battery usage?

Thanks a lot.

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Answer 1

roee84 OP

Feb ’17

Same experience - first place of battery usage, 20%, 1 min on screen.

Facebook is second place.

Already got some complaints about it.

0

Answer 2

lbc OP

Nov ’23

This is a common problem affecting app using its own NE implementation (instead of using iOS's built-in VPN clients), e.g. commonly seen with VPN/PacketTunnelProviders. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/99042

Apple doesn't appear to be interested in fixing this, since they did nothing with the bug reported in that discussion thread. There must be some way to get Apple to do something about this. The battery impact is likely calculated based on the estimated cpu and radio usage for the traffic performed by the NE, so a simple thing for them would be to deduct the "inside" traffic being performed by apps going thru the NE from the "outside" traffic blamed on the NE when calculating battery usage.

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