Is constant turning off/on bad?

[Android Central Question]

I'm traveling and I only turn my phone on when I'm about to use it and then turn it off if I'm done to save battery. Is it bad?

 

[hallux]

Well, there are no mechanical components that are going to wear out, except maybe the power button but those get abused anyway. The only downside I could see is that the phone is not "at the ready" if you need to power it on - taking 10-60 seconds to boot the OS then as much as another few minutes to complete syncs of any mail accounts you have logged in and updates to other items in the background which can slow the phone down some until it's complete.

One could argue that the power-on process and those syncs will consume more power than just leaving the phone on, depending on how often you do it. An alternative would be to just enable airplane mode when you don't need the device, then turn it off when you need to make a call or send a message.

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[Rukbat]

It's like turning the car off to save gas. (The rule of thumb there is if you're going to be gone for more than 60 second, turn it off - it takes about as much gas to start as it takes to idle for 60 seconds.) If the phone is going to be off for more than about 5 minutes, turn it off. But less than that won't save much battery, with the constant reloading the OS and the startup apps.

If the phone is rooted, you can use an app to turn it off, saving the power switch, but as hallux said, that's about the only thing you'll "wear out" - turning the phone on and off doesn't involve any other parts that wear out.