“Does leaving stopwatch constantly running on your smartphone drain its battery significantly faster, or is it not a big deal?”

(Answer requested by Nikola Cvetanovski)

It’s probably not significant, but that really depends on a host of variables.

Let’s try a thought experiment, where you can make assumptions about the variables:

Let’s say the phone is on, but with the screen off. No non-system software is running (ie no other apps besides the stopwatch app); no maintenance, downloads, location pings, or other background work is going on; and no other apps wake up during the period in question (ie nothing disturbs the phone at all).

We’ll further assume the stopwatch app is properly coded for the device it’s running on, and isn’t some miscoded junk app that doesn’t work properly on your hardware.

With all that in mind:

If the stopwatch app is running in the background, it’s likely just a minor software process that lets the system clock (which is always running anyway) do most of the work. The internal operations of the stopwatch app shouldn’t have much effect on the battery at all.

But if the stopwatch app is doing other stuff, then all bets are off. For example, if you leave the app on-screen, then it’ll for sure use more battery than otherwise. But that’s mostly the lit screen eating the battery — not the stopwatch app.

Similarly, if the app is constantly communicating with a server somewhere (eg an exercise timer phoning home to a health-tracking app’s server) then the communication (and not so much the stopwatch itself) will drain the battery more than otherwise.

But on its own, a simple timer shouldn’t eat much power at all.

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