Free apps drain your battery

[darrylsb]

I found this article today on NewScientist.

Abhinav Pathak, a computer scientist at Purdue University, Indiana, and colleagues made the discovery after developing software to analyse apps' energy usage. When they looked at popular apps such as Angry Birds, Free Chess and NYTimes they found that only 10 to 30 per cent of the energy was spent powering the app's core function.


Free apps eat up your phone battery just sending ads - tech - 18 March 2012 - New Scientist

 

[Uncle Louie]

Never really thought about it, but it makes sense; I guess that is just the cost of it being "free."

 

[treotraveler]

I found this article today on NewScientist.

Abhinav Pathak, a computer scientist at Purdue University, Indiana, and colleagues made the discovery after developing software to analyse apps' energy usage. When they looked at popular apps such as Angry Birds, Free Chess and NYTimes they found that only 10 to 30 per cent of the energy was spent powering the app's core function.


Free apps eat up your phone battery just sending ads - tech - 18 March 2012 - New Scientist

Yeah, if you're going to spend a lot of time playing Angry Birds, or any other good free game, turn data off and you won't see ads using up your battery.....

 

[DirkBelig]

I saw this article reported at Lifehacker and in the comments, several people mentioned using AdFree to block the ads. I downloaded it and had a loooooong night of sheer hell as a result. The cure was so much worse than the ailment.

 

[jigwashere]

AdFree works great to block ads on rooted devices. I have it on my E4GT as well as other Android devices. Turning off data while playing games and blocking ads might not solve the data drain, however. It's possible that the app software itself will try to ping the ad sites whether they're blocked or not, and might try to auto-update even if the game isn't playing. It's this constant activity that drains the battery. Well, at least that's what I read somewhere and it seems to make sense. I wish the Lifehacker or other articles has something more definitive.