Free Apps Eat Your Smartphone Battery 214
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."
Not always true (Score:4, Interesting)
The custom firmware I use on my Android smartphone redirects all ad domains to 127.0.0.1, so no ads for me.
Re:Correction (Score:5, Interesting)
More specifically, bad ad serving code eats your smartphone battery.
If your app connects to an ad server/framework every minute, or on particular events, etc. etc. each time... then yes, that's going to suck down energy real fast.
Instead, download multiple ads (in the background), serve from that pool.
Better yet, as somebody at a Dutch tech site suggested, let shared ad frameworks do this so that N ads downloaded can be shared across multiple apps.
There are down sides, of course:
- the ads in the pool may become outdated. I.e. if somebody searched for PNDs today, the ads downloaded yesterday won't be notifying you of the latest TomTom/Garmin/whatever offerings. This can be corrected by always refreshing after a set time.
- you may end up downloading more ads than you'll actually use before such a refresh, which means you actually used more energy (and bandwidth) than you would have under traditional methods.
But in general, all this opening/closing of connections which in turn may or may not lead to 3G / 4G modules kicking into action, etc. is just inefficient.
Re:Then how about people start paying for the apps (Score:0, Interesting)
Doesn't align with Google's strategy, which is to sell you to as many advertisers as possible. It's the reason Android exists at all and why they encourage free, ad-supported apps over paid apps.
JuiceDefender (Score:5, Interesting)
I rarely shill for a product but if you have an Android phone with a less-than-optimal battery (like me), JuiceDefender [juicedefender.com] does wonders. It turns off your phone's wi-fi and data connections (except for situations you configure like a streaming radio app is open) when your screen is off, turning them back on every X minutes so apps like email an sync on a reasonable schedule while not killing your battery. This by itself can save a huge amount of battery life (though it can do a lot more).
By its own calculations (which I of course take with a grain of salt) it has more than doubled my effective battery life, and I would guess from practical use that it's nearly correct.
Re:Ads? What are they? (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, come to think of it.. I don't think I've ever dreamed (of) an ad.
Off-topic as this might be, I'm going to pose this as a serious question: have any of you ever dreamed an ad?
I've had a great many number of dreams that range wildly in topics and vividness. I once woke up remember several lines of text from a book I was reading in my dream - I googled the lines of text but as far as it was concerned, those lines were not written anywhere for it to find.
But I don't recall having ever seen an ad. Or even related. I.e. walking down a city, I remember stores, I remember cars, traffic, people, the rain, a gust of wind... I don't, however, remember any H&M ads in the bus stalls, or Heineken sign outside a bar.
( Of course now that I've written this, I'll bet I'll be dreaming of ads come tonight. Damn. )