The phone battery screen has long been the strongest piece of evidence against running a VPN all day. See a VPN app sitting near the top of your energy consumption list, and the instinct is to switch it off. New testing from West Coast Labs, a firm that evaluates digital apps and services, suggests that instinct is based on a misreading of how phones actually track power use.
What the testing actually measured
The lab ran a 24-hour simulation across six devices, three running Android and three running iOS, including recent Samsung, Google and Apple hardware. Each device went through a typical day: sleep, a commute, working hours and evening use at home, repeated once with a VPN connection active throughout and once without. Rather than relying on the phone's own battery statistics, the testers measured actual electrical current draw at the device level, a method that captures real power consumption instead of how the operating system chooses to attribute it.
The gap between the two was striking. Device-level measurements showed the VPN app itself added only between 1.4% and 1.8% to total energy use over a full day. Yet on the standard battery settings screen, the same app often appeared to be consuming far more, in some cases ranking above the browser or camera.
Why the phone's battery screen gets it wrong
The explanation lies in how mobile operating systems account for network activity. A VPN works by routing all of a device's internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a remote server, a process known as tunneling. Every packet of data, whether it comes from a streaming app, a browser or a messaging service, passes through that tunnel. Android and iOS tend to log this traffic under the app managing the connection, which is the VPN, rather than under the app that actually generated the data.
The effect becomes obvious with video streaming. In the testing, watching a show for an hour while connected to a VPN caused the battery screen to attribute roughly 49% of that session's energy use to the VPN app. Actual current measurements told a different story: the real additional load from the VPN was between 1.6% and 2.1%. The screen itself, the video decoding and the display brightness, not the encryption, accounted for nearly all the power drawn.
Protocols matter more than the app itself
Not every VPN connection method is equally efficient, and this is where genuine differences exist. The protocol is the underlying system a VPN uses to build and maintain its encrypted tunnel. OpenVPN, introduced in 2001, remains widely used but was designed before mobile battery efficiency was a serious engineering concern, and it can demand more processing overhead. WireGuard, a newer and leaner protocol, was built specifically to reduce that cost, and proprietary variants such as NordLynx apply the same underlying approach. Much of the older reputation VPNs have for draining batteries traces back to the computational habits of legacy protocols rather than to encryption itself.
Network switching and background use
A separate concern involves what happens when a phone moves between networks, as on a commute, forcing the VPN to repeatedly reconnect. A two-hour simulated trip with network changes every nine minutes produced an energy increase of about 5.1% on Android and 6.8% on iOS, both comfortably under the 15% threshold the test treated as significant. Reconnection succeeded in more than 99 of every 100 attempts. With the screen off and the VPN idle in the background, consumption stayed below 0.5% of battery capacity per hour.
The broader implication is reassuring for anyone weighing privacy against convenience. A VPN encrypts traffic and shields browsing activity from internet providers and networks, a protection that matters more as public Wi-Fi use and data collection both expand. These findings indicate that maintaining that protection does not come at a meaningful cost to battery life, and the figures shown in phone settings should be read with considerable skepticism.
