Free Apps Eat Your Smartphone Battery 214
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the om-nom-nom dept.
from the om-nom-nom dept.
judgecorp writes "Here's a reason to pay for smartphone apps: the free versions can spend three times as much energy finding and serving ads as they do serving their actual purpose. Research from a Purdue University scientist found that as much as 75 percent of the energy used by free apps (PDF) goes on accessing location services, finding suitable advertisements and displaying them."
AdAway (Score:4, Informative)
Android + AdAway (free, in the market) on a rooted device == no ads. It also mitigates the security risks associated with third party ads.
Re:Not always true (Score:4, Informative)
All you need is root access, then there is more that one app to setup a redirect.
Re:AdAway (Score:4, Informative)
Mostly. I got bit briefly by Airpush ads, which seem to be immune to hosts redirections, which both AdAway and (my choice) AdFree use.
To locate the apps that sneak in Airpush capabilities, I use AirPush Detector, which (quoting the author) "detects other installed applications which appear to use known notification ad frameworks and offers the user the ability to easily uninstall them.... This app is open source...."
free != ads (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Most apps suck (Score:4, Informative)
Re:AdAway (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe DroidWall will work. It only allows network access to apps that you grant permission.
Re:Not always true (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily custom firmware. Just root the phone, install AdFree and there you go.
It helps quite a bit. As I heard it, going to address 0.0.0.0 is faster that 127.0.0.1 though.
That said, I have done it and yeah, it saves time, screen space and all that.
Re:Not always true (Score:4, Informative)
One thing that is done is that once root is attained, create a symlink at /etc/hosts pointing to a file on the SD or external_SD and then you can edit it without root. But root has to have happened at some point and in some way.
Re:Not always true (Score:4, Informative)
You miss my point [slashdot.org].
Case in point, you have to have a rooted phone for that app to work.
Re:Not always true (Score:5, Informative)
Adaway works for me.
It's even open source. You need root, first, though.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adaway&hl=en [google.com]