In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes.
I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise.
To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind).
On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances.
I had the opposite experience going from a OnePlus 8T stock to Lineage OS. Having root means being able to reduce the amount of apps and wake up — no google play service was the key. This was a while ago but I went from 1-2 days of battery life to about 4-5 days. This is with light use, screen on time was equally draining with both setups.
I would assume that an iPhone has similar amounts of unwanted background apps and would also be able to gain battery life instead of losing it if rooted. Obviously if you install spyware, you lose a lot of battery life. Funnily enough, I remember that a few years ago, people were surprised to find that uninstalling facebook increased battery life because it behaved much like spyware.
Reading this comment, one would think Apple devices are very power efficient at the cost of running little in the background. In my experience, iOS has terrible battery life in the default mode, which is background app refresh enabled, and in general apps struggle keeping their state in the background, which is something that many people complain about on the internet. So the worst of the two worlds.
> In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes.
Well, except Android :P
My phone runs a build of AOSP that I compiled myself. I can go change the source code to do whatever I want (and I do). It's pretty cool that that's possible IMO. To be fair, the drivers are closed-source
> I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve.
No offense, but this is one of the most absurd things I have ever read on a hackernews discussion.
I bet if I could get root on iOS I would get even better battery life as I kill off services related to iCloud and other background processes I don’t want running.
> To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features.
There is zero evidence that this is the case. In fact saying “no” to root allows more services and things running on the device than I may want.
To get good battery life out of a device, having complete software and hardware integration is key. That's the PC blessing and curse, having to support all kinds of different CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, RAM, etc from many different places.
When you just have to focus on a handful of hardware platforms and when you own the hardware and software, this becomes much, much easier.
I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise.
To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind).
On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances.