Free Apps Burn Through Battery Thanks to Ads

Do you love your free apps? Well, you might want to consider upgrading to the premium version. It turns out that ad-supported apps destroy battery life on phones, thanks to the constant connectivity required.

Research by Abhinav Pathak on free Android apps shows that up to 75% of the energy that they consume is purely used to show ads. As an example, Only 20% of the battery drain from playing Angry Birds actually comes from playing the game and running the screen. The other 80% is split between finding the user’s location and another 28% is used up uploading the data to the internet. The remainder is mostly miscellaneous things that vary from moment to moment.


Ignoring the fact that these games are tracking your location and your information--they have been doing that for ages, and it is nothing new--what is striking is how inefficient these mobile ad networks are. Pathak found that the 3G connection to the internet was established and left on for 10 seconds, and it was left on for those 10 seconds even if the data was uploaded in the first millisecond. This is what accounts for the high 28% wasted uploading your information to the internet.

After studying the apps, Pathak concluded that only 10%-30% of the power consumed by free apps actually goes towards running the game, and that these results apply to most ad-supported games.

So if you are struggling to get through a day on a single charge of your battery, you might want to look at your apps. If you tend to use any ad-supported ones, well, you could be doing in the battery performance of the device yourself.

NewScientist