According to a recent study, free smartphone apps may be eating more battery than paid apps because they serve ads.
According to the study, about 25 - 35% of power consumption went to third-party ad code displayed in apps. For example, in Angry Birds 20% of the power is used to run the game, but 45% of the power is used to find the user's location (GPS), then downloading location specific ads. Nice.
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.
According to the study, about 25 - 35% of power consumption went to third-party ad code displayed in apps. For example, in Angry Birds 20% of the power is used to run the game, but 45% of the power is used to find the user's location (GPS), then downloading location specific ads. Nice.