Do You Know Free Apps Drain Smartphone Battery Faster?
Free versions of apps exhaust smartphone battery while serving ads and tracking and uploading user information.Free versions of applications can drain the entire battery of a smartphone in 90 minutes as they load ads and gather user information,according to a study by New Scientist magazine.The study was conducted by researcher Abhinav Pathak,a computer scientist at Purdue University,Indiana,and his colleagues.It found that running only one Android app could eat up your battery in about 90 minutes.
Free apps could be draining the battery of your phone or tablet faster than it needs to.Purdue University developed software to determine how much energy popular free apps actually use.The free versions of apps like Angry Birds,Free Chess,and the New York Times use only 10 to 30 percent of its energy to run the game.The rest of the power bank is being used to figure out a user’s location and download ads.So,to save you battery,it’s suggested just to buy the app.
The surprising part is that the core part of free apps like Angry Birds,Free Chess and NYTimes is that they consume only 10 to 30 per cent of the battery.For instance,Angry Birds uses only 20 per cent to display and run the game,while 45 per cent is spent finding and uploading the user’s location with GPS and downloading location-appropriate ads over a 3G connection (using 2G will help save some battery).The researchers developed a program to calculate energy consumed by different apps.Pathak says that energy leakage due to inefficiencies in third-party code that developers use to keep the production costs of free apps low is responsible for superfluous battery consumption.They found that the 3G connection stays active for about ten seconds even if data transmission is complete,and this ‘tail energy’ drains an additional 28 per cent of the app’s energy.
The research team used six smartphone applications to study.These include Angry Birds and Facebook.They compared the results on three HTC handsets the Android powered Magic and Passion,TyTN II running on Windows Mobile OS.The iPhone wasn’t tested due to the restrictions built into the OS.With free versions of the Angry Birds,only 20 percent of the power is being consumed by the game.Forty-five percent of the nimh batteries power is being consumed finding out the player’s whereabouts so that a specific ads can be served.They also found out what they call a “3G tail”.This is when a battery’s energy continues to be sapped even after a particular action.They found out that this “3G tail” accounts to more than 25 percent power consumption.
Saving a few bucks by downloading free apps have been very ideal for spendthrift individuals.Unfortunately, your free app downloading hobby may turn your device into a battery eating machine.Researchers from Microsoft and Purdue University teamed up and used a special profiling tool to find out the connection between free apps and a smartphone’s battery life. In one case,75 percent of an app’s power requirement was spent not on gameplay but on operating third-party ad services.
Article From: http://www.batteryfaq.net/battery-news/do-you-know-free-apps-drain-smartphone-battery-faster-1729.html
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