Free apps are enemies of smartphone battery

The free apps can drain all the battery power of the smartphones in just 90 minutes. This is because they load ads and also gather the user information, says a study. The researchers involved in the study claim that one active Android app can drain the battery in just 90 minutes.

Surprisingly, the main part of these free apps actually consume only 10% to 30% of the power. For example, the free Angry Birds game application consumes only 20% of the battery to run the game while 45% of the power is consumed only to find and upload the user location using GPS. It requires more power to download the location specific ads over the 3G connectivity. May be the usage of 2G might save the battery power to some extent.

The researchers have developed a program that can calculate the energy that is consumed by several apps. They have found that the 3G connectivity stays active for ten seconds even after the data transmission.

The reason for the energy leakage is the inefficiency of the third party code that the developers use. These codes are used to keep the production costs of the free apps as low as possible. This is the reason behind the excess battery consumption.