Does Ubuntu Touch consume less power than Android? [closed]

One of the problems of new OSs is power consumption. That is because power and performance requires a lot of tweaks and experience with the kernel, drivers and OS code-base on one hand, and a lot of extensive long-term test and quality assurance on the other hand.

Given that Android is a rather old and established OS I saw that it has pretty good power consumption. Phoronix does this kind of comparissions but I was not able to find much about Ubuntu Touch.

Does Ubuntu Touch consume less than Android, do you have data on some platforms compared?

Solution 1:

My personal view (Might not be the answer you seek):

Why Android consumes more power?

Android applications utilize Google's highly optimized Java Virtual Machine. So if you are looking from out side, an Android application is run inside a virtual machine which is inside the real machine. So you actually have two machines instead of one.

Everytime an android app produces an instruction, it should be translated to into the native machine code from an intermediate code and is then executed by the CPU. This is an extra step which consumes power.

Ubuntu Touch's Internal Nature

Ubuntu touch has no Java Virtual Machine overhead. It can directly run binary programs compiled for the CPU, completely eliminating the need of translation. So we know the power consumption should be less in Ubuntu Touch for a certain extent.

However most Ubuntu Touch apps so far use an interpreter called qmlscene which does something similar to Java Virtual Machine. Those apps aren't in binary format but human readable code. The code is interpreted to CPU instructions at run time. qmlscene's impact on performance is less than Java runtime, because no virtual machine is involved. It is not noted to be a power hungry system as QT developers have made it extremely efficient.

There are many other reasons for extra power consumption as well. It includes 3G/4G usage management, background services etc. We ignore such facts, because they get different from one device to another. Those facts are at least controllable by the operating system for a certain extent.

Summary

Ubuntu touch will most probably consume less power than Android. At the time of writing it is not yet optimized to do so. We will have to wait until phones come out.

Solution 2:

Ubuntu Touch may use more power on phones where it was not installed by default, because the drivers are not optimized by the people who created the phone, and may be less efficient than on Android.

To get a reliable answer, you will have to compare two nearly identical phones, one running Ubuntu Touch and the other Android. The one running Ubuntu Touch should be tuned to support Ubuntu (e.g. the Meizu or bq phones announced recently).