Why your Android Phone battery depletes so Quickly: Study

Do you wonder why your Android phone battery needed too frequent recharging; something which defeats the claim made in the phone brochure?

Then the culprit may be apps you run — especially if they serve you ads — according to a new study.

The Study and How it's conducted:

A recent research by Microsoft and Purdue University, looked at five of the most popular Android apps: Angry Birds, The New York Times reader, MapQuest, Free Chess and the Android browser.

The study employed a custom-made app called EProf (capable of not only detecting how much power the app was using, but also the energy demands of specific app activities), to test the battery drain of each app on an HTC Passion running Android 2.3 “Gingerbread.”

The test results revealed that the activities related to serving the user ads consume the most power. Of the total power consumed by Angry Birds, for example, a full 45% of it used to track ad-related user data (such as location). For Free Chess, the apps consumes between 65-75% on serving ads, uploading user info and tracking.

The New York Times, which although showed at a better light comepared to Angry birds and Free Chess, still used about 15% of the battery life for ad related tracking purposes.

As expected, the Android browser's power consumption varied depending on the sites visited, but the amount of power consumed to track the user averaged out to 16%.

In addition to tracking, there are significant additional drains on the battery because of inefficient coding in ad modules. The research found that many ad-related functions create a “3G tail” — that is, a period where the ad is still using the phone's power-intensive 3G connection when it doesn't need to.

Recommendation:

The study recommends developers can make their apps more power efficient by bundling some separate functions into a single process. The research suggests that some apps could reduce power consumption by up to 65% with better-coded ad modules.

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