They've never been that bad in my experience. My guess is you were using something preinstalled with a ton of battery leeching crap.

Android itself doesn't do that, but much like buying a PC, it's hard to stop manufacturers loading it up with cruft.

I had a lot of experience with tons of devices from both ecosystems (because I was at least part-time in mobile dev) from about 2011-2019 and a consistent hallmark of Android devices—regardless of manufacturer, Google's own devices weren't much better—was that their battery life, and especially idle battery life, was markedly worse than iOS devices. In fact, I came into that world as an Android user, and gaining extensive exposure to both ecosystems was what convinced me I'd be better off in almost every way by switching. Android devices only stopped being an absolute joke, by comparison, near the end of that span, but were still lagging on both performance (as far as actual in-practice UX, not benchmarks) and real-world battery life. But it's entirely possible they've closed the gap since.

It had to have been the apps that were running on Android. It's nothing to do with the hardware. I used to have my pixels, back from 2012, regularly at less than 10%, and would still last overnight as you describe. If a pixel not running any crap apps was worse, it was only be a negligible amount.

The gap was never that big, it was more the software that was running than any hardware issues.

> The gap was never that big

No, it really was. I wasn't hallucinating stock Android tablets dying over long weekends while iOS tablets would still be usable for testing without needing to plug in, after three weeks in a drawer. Or the phones needing a daily charge if you barely used them, while Apple phones could go 3-4 days under light use. There were no exceptions to this in Android land.

[EDIT] Incidentally, yes, I agree it was largely a software issue—but at the OS level.

I don't know what to tell you, but your experience is very different from mine and most androids users (who knew what they were doing).

Disable all the software crap and there was no real difference. You think it was more internal to the OS, and maybe part of it was, but even with just ending all the crap that fixed things.

We agree there were no significant differences in hardware though, and that was my point.