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I'm thinking about making an app which will require Bluetooth to be available at all times. However, if this reduces battery charge life significantly, then that's kind of a show stopper. Can anyone give me a general idea about how much drain constant Bluetooth use will put on the battery?

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What drains... my special. Here some data samples, based on a Motorola Droid:

+--------------------+----------+
| Mode               | Energy   |
+--------------------+----------+
| Bluetooth receive  | 751 mW   |
| Bluetooth send     | 487 mW   |
| Bluetooth standby  |   2,8 mW |
+--------------------+----------+

So if you use BT quite regularly (e.g. to be able to immediately pick up a call with your headset), having it in standby doesn't hurt that much (Compare: 2G StandBy 11,6 mW, 3G StandBy 18,3 mW, Wifi StandBy 7,8 mW -- and, often mistaken: GPS StandBy 0,4 mW).

But if, on the other hand, you use BT once a week (or even less) -- heck, you can manually enable it then, there are enough "toggle switches" and widgets available.

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Constant use of Bluetooth will put quite a significant drain on the battery, even having it on is known to drain the battery.

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    It will certainly drain it faster than having it turned off. However, how fast will vary depending on the phone.
    – BBlake
    Oct 31, 2010 at 12:29
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It really depends on what you are using Bluetooth for. I have a Bluetooth watch (MBW-150) that I sync with my phone using OpenWatch and it affects my battery life minimally. All it does is sync the phone's time with my watch, vibrates on certain notifications/calls, and gives me control of my music player (play/stop/next/prev/volume). So I essentially have Bluetooth turned on all the time and haven't really seen a battery problem because of it.

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I have a Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant):

  • With Bluetooth & Sync turned on, but the Bluetooth not connected, I better have > 45% battery before I go to bed or else my phone will be dead by morning.

  • With Bluetooth & Sync turned off, I only use 1-2% battery overnight.

How much of that is Bluetooth and how much is Sync, I don't know. But the combination sure kicks the crap outta my phone.

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Personally i recently got a wireless earphones for making calls and sometimes i turn my earphones off but forget to turn off my bluetooth on my phone. I usually found this to be a problem since i would charge my phone before gping to bed and leaving it at 50%. Before it used to last me over night but lately i been waking up to zero percent battery... so personally i don't advice you to leave bluetooth on... plus for me it cause my phone to overheat while charging.

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  • This is exactly the style of data I wanted to know, but that is a surprisingly high drain. The truth is what I want to know, but I'd hope that the current truth is better than that! Do you know what Android version you had installed; what kind of Bluetooth hardware your phone used; and whether it was connecting to any Bluetooth devices?
    – naki
    Oct 10, 2017 at 22:36
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Below is an article from Techrepublic. There is a lot of anecdotal "yes" here, but very little scientific responses. I think if you look at the actual analysis responses using hard data, you'll see that bluetooth has little impact on battery. I never turn off bluetooth on my phone and have several apps that use bluetooth, and the only time my battery doesn't last all day is when I play a game or two on it.

10 common misconceptions about mobile device batteries

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On my Galaxy S3 even if I have bluetooth turned on but do not use it at all it still drains my battery 30% faster as opposed to if it was turned off!

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    Hello and welcome to Android Enthusiasts Lance! :) While your answer is valid, it would be great if you could provide some data from your experience ( if you have some time available you could screenshot the battery life screen on multiple runs with bluetooth turned off/on) :)
    – benjamin
    Jun 1, 2016 at 8:07

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