- West Coast Labs found that the VPN battery drain is just a myth
- Leaving NordVPN on for 24 hours drains just up to 1.8% of battery
- NordVPN's NordLynx uses up to 31% less battery than OpenVPN
One of the biggest reasons people turn off their cybersecurity apps is the fear of a dead smartphone. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that running a virtual private network (VPN) in the background will relentlessly chew through your daily charge.
However, new independent research commissioned by NordVPN reveals that this long-held belief is actually a massive misunderstanding. If you've been avoiding firing up the best VPN to save a few precious battery percentage points, your phone has probably been lying to you.
West Coast Labs carried out an evaluation across flagship Apple, Samsung, and Google devices. Testing showed that running NordVPN continuously for a full 24 hours added a mere 1.4% to daily battery use on Android and just 1.8% on iOS.
To put that into perspective, leaving the VPN active all day on a premium Android device means you would only need to charge it roughly half a day earlier over the course of an entire month.
Why your phone's battery screen is lying to you
"Battery drain is one of the biggest reasons people avoid using a VPN," says Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer (CTO) at NordVPN. "We wanted to know if that myth holds up, and it turns out it largely doesn’t. Your phone makes VPN battery use look a lot scarier than it actually is."
The confusion stems from how Android and iOS calculate power consumption. When a VPN is active, your device routes all its internet traffic through that encrypted tunnel. Because of this, your smartphone's operating system labels all that transferred data as belonging to the VPN app.
If you stream a video or browse the web, your battery usage screen blames the VPN for the power drop. During an hour of streaming, West Coast Labs found that phones attributed an average of 49% of the session's battery drop to NordVPN.
However, when researchers used hardware instruments to measure the actual electrical current draw, the real VPN overhead was just 1.6% to 2.1%. Essentially, your phone's battery screen is simply counting data volume, not actual power loss. When idle, the background overhead is less than 0.5% of battery capacity per hour.
The commuter test and modern protocols
Another scenario notorious for eating up battery life is the daily commute. Phones rapidly switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data networks can force apps to constantly reconnect, draining juice in the process.
West Coast Labs simulated a two-hour commute with automated network switches every nine minutes. Even under this stress, NordVPN's transition overhead stayed at just 5.1% on Android and 6.8% on iOS. The app also successfully reconnected after more than 99 out of every 100 network switches.
So, where did the battery-draining myth come from? The report points the finger at older technology, specifically OpenVPN. Built in 2001, OpenVPN was designed long before mobile battery efficiency was a priority.
In contrast, NordVPN’s proprietary NordLynx protocol — which is built on the much lighter WireGuard standard — uses modern cryptography requiring significantly less processing power. Benchmarking tests showed NordLynx uses 31% less battery per unit of data than OpenVPN on Android, and 24% less on iOS.
“People deserve to make informed choices about their online security. If battery drain was the reason someone wasn’t using a VPN, we hope this report puts that concern to rest for good," says Briedis.
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