Free Apps Eat Your Smartphone Battery

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."

Comments

Not always true

[Anonymous Coward]

The custom firmware I use on my Android smartphone redirects all ad domains to 127.0.0.1, so no ads for me.

Re:Not always true

[Noughmad]

All you need is root access, then there is more that one app to setup a redirect.

Re:Not always true

[courteaudotbiz]

But if you use AdBlock Free, does it suck up your battery to display ads?

Re:Not always true

[erroneus]

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

[erroneus]

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

[X0563511]

You miss my point.

Case in point, you have to have a rooted phone for that app to work.

Re:Not always true

[JackieBrown]

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

Correction

[Tyrannosaur]

Ads Eat Your Smartphone Battery

Re:Correction

[QuasiSteve]

Ads Eat Your Smartphone Battery

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- the ads in the pool may become outdated.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:Correction

[cpu6502]

In other news:

Ads on television waste anywhere from 1/3rd to one-half the power used while watching TV. ;-) Back in the 1960/70s when ads were only 9 minutes per hour, TV ads only wasted 15% power.

AdAway

[macemoneta]

Android + AdAway (free, in the market) on a rooted device == no ads. It also mitigates the security risks associated with third party ads.

Re:AdAway

[idontgno]

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...."

Re:What?!?

[kenh]

Apps that download ads use 100% more energy downlaoding ads than apps that don't download ads... Who knew?

Next up, parked cars consume 100% less gas than cars being driven down the road.

And there is a study underway in Europe that hopes to confirm my suspicion that empty boxes weigh less than full boxes.

free != ads

[Kenja]

There are free apps without ads and there are paid for apps with ads. Title should be that ads eat up battery life, which is kind of a no brainer.

Re:Ads? What are they?

[artor3]

Since you obviously read Slashdot, I'd say you see at least a couple every day. They're just disguised as stories.

Re:Most apps suck

[mark-t]

The problem is that the app store business model has generated a type of user that won't generally pay anything over even $.99 for any app, regardless of how useful it might seem to be. The only way to generate revenue from this extremely HUGE section of the market is to have advertisements in the application that can produce a continuous revenue stream from these people, with, of course, an option to make an in-app purchase that disables the ads, and perhaps unlocks additional features.

JuiceDefender

[TheSpoom]

I rarely shill for a product but if you have an Android phone with a less-than-optimal battery (like me), JuiceDefender 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:Free?

[Noughmad]

Of course, just like writing Slashdot posts on a "free" operating system with a "free" desktop environment and a "free" browser is just drowning me in ads.

Re:Not a problem

[Oswald McWeany]

You can get angry birds easily on any platform.

1) Place phone on birdfeeder.
2) Fill birdfeeder with catfood.

Re:Ads? What are they?

[QuasiSteve]

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. )

Misleading article is misleading

[flibuste]

As a developer of entirely free Android applications (free as in "beer" and in "free of ads"), I take offense at the overgeneralization of the article to "Free Applications". If you are not a careful reader, this may lead you to think that ALL free apps are full of ads AND power eaters.
A lot of "free" apps don't have ads and don't use more power than any other app. Many behave actually way better than paid ones.
Stupid article is stupid.