Ad-supported Android apps are eating up your battery

Have you ever wondered why your smartphone battery drains so fast? A recent research claims that the culprit might be free ad-supported apps.  According to a team of researchers from Purdue University and Microsoft, upto 75pc of the total app related battery drain is caused by the user tracking, and downloading adverts.

One of the main issues with today's smartphones is their battery-life and it is upto the app developers to make their apps battery friendly and it seems advertisements used in these apps, which is a popular way to generate revenue, is contributing a lot in draining smartphone battery.
The research team tested five popular Android apps (Angry Birds, FreeChess, New York Times, Mapquest, and Android browser) on HTC Nexus One running Gingerbread and found the following data on app energy usage.

While testing Angry Birds, the team found out that the core part of the game only used 18pc of the app energy, on the other hand the whole process of user tracking, and downloading the ads consumed 73pc of the total app energy.

Similarly in the game FreeChess, the game actually uses only 25-35pc of the energy, while user tracking, uploading user information, and downloaded ads took around 65.75pc of the app energy.

The research team blames the in-efficiency in the third party code used by the app developers as a part of advertisement for the energy leakage.