At first it felt ‘magical’ being able to reach self-hosted services from my phone regardless of my location, but I quickly noticed the battery drain as well. I believe it has to do with an always-on ‘VPN’ and I don’t expect any improvements soon.

I’ve decided that Tailscale works perfect for all my computers (e.g., Raspberry Pi, Synology NAS, laptop and VPS), but not for my mobile devices. To mitigate this I use cloudflared on my VPS to route internet traffic over tailscale to any internal services that I often use on my phone.

Cloudflared has good options for securing a tunnel by using MFA methods, for example Google authentication.

For the rare occasion that I need to access something else I can always temporary join the Tailscale network from my phone.

It is not caused by an always-on VPN, but by Tailscale. Having e.g. plain Wireguard enabled 24/7 doesn't cause the battery drain or the other issues Tailscale on iOS has.

Unfortunately, Wireguard on iOS doesn't work very well with dyndns, as it doesn't re-resolve dns and thus silently loses the connection when public home IPs change.

What are you hosting from your phone? Personally, I think upcycled phones plugged into USB drives are the future of selfhosting, but the software's not there yet.

I’ve had this same issue. I just toggle Tailscale off now most of the time, and only turn it on when I really need it on my phone.

Shame though, cause I was also wanting to use it to funnel DNS. I’ve somewhat given up there. I hope they fix their app.

It also eats a lot of data, I recently had around 3gb eaten in a day just for maintaining the connection. On a metered mobile connection with 6gb/month a tad too much.

I‘d really like to use it, but in this state it’s really unusable for me.

Same, it's really a shame as tailsclae is great but it uses so much battery on my ios devices I cant keep it active.