Smartphone Sensor Battery Consumption: A Standardized and Reproducible Test Protocol

We present a low-cost, fully reproducible software and hardware protocol for smartphone sensor battery cost tests. Our pipeline combines a rigorous hardware checklist and light-sealed enclosure, a software checklist for iOS devices, and a BatteryTest app to control sensor configurations and log battery state during tests. Methodologically, we applied this standardized protocol in 30 independent analyzed test runs using six iPhone 14 Pro and three iPhone 13 Pro devices, and compared battery-life outcomes across predefined sensor conditions (idle, TrueDepth, GPS, accelerometer, pedometer, gyroscope, and rear camera), sampling rates, and sensor-specific settings. Key findings include: (i) Baseline battery life was approximately 10% higher on the 14 Pro versus the 13 Pro models under idle conditions. Sensor activation substantially reduced battery life, with GPS and camera usage exhibiting the strongest impact. (ii) Software parameters matter: the sampling rate change from 27 s to 3 s led to significantly decreased battery life in several scenarios, while reducing the location accuracy in GPS tests increased battery life by up to 20 h on the 13 Pro devices. (iii) Cross-device-generation consistency is heterogeneous. The iPhone 14 Pro lasts up to 50% longer on GPS tests, yet drains about an hour faster than the 13 Pro in camera tests. This work introduces the first standardized, and fully reproducible protocol for quantifying sensor-specific battery consumption on iPhones, enabling consistent, comparable, and low-cost energy benchmarking across device generations.