How do you find your typical daily battery life with it always on?

I’ve tried this in the past and had to revert as I found it made a noticeable difference in my day-to-day.

Curious to hear the experience of others.

I have the impression tailscale drains my battery on macOS and iOS, only turn it on when truly needed.

Yeah, it most certainly does. Very noticeable on iOS. I don’t know if this is an Apple specific thing, or if it’s a similar story on Android.

It’s WireGuard underneath, which is designed to not be very chatty when idle, so I’d put this down to regular back and forth with Tailscale’s control plane, relays, etc.

It’s a shame really, because a huge value prop of TS is that it’s a VPN you just leave on and forget about. I hate having to toggle it when I inevitably forget to and wonder why I’m getting connection errors to private resources.

I have an ipv6 wireguard vpn from my iOS phone to my home network. It routes all traffic through my home isp. I use the wireguard iOS client. Battery life has been fine for me. One caveat is that background updates are disabled for almost every app.

Was it OpenVPN that you tried in the past? Wireguard seems much better