Free apps eat up your phone battery

I just read this article about a team of researchers from Purdue University and Microsoft who have made a rather starling discovery as to why android phones are not able able to sustain the battery life. They say it all boils down to free apps with ads. So, what do you guys think about this research? Has this spelt doom for ad supported apps? You can read the article http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328566.400-free-apps-eat-up-your-phone-battery-just-sending-ads.html

Very interesting!

The problem is, that users of SDKs from ad partners can not do much against it. You have to enable all the permissions the SDK needs (and it usually includes internet access) and the ad framework can download what ever they want…

Using GPS for location aware ads it not so common, is it?

I am not aware if it possible to use GPS for this purpose, but i think the solution lies with Android guys + AD partners. Android guys should see how best to save on the battery life from their side and there should be SDK optimization on the device it is running on to ensure that energy leakages in third party SDKs are well taken care of. Otherwise its crazy when it claimed that Ads within Android apps consumes 75 percent of the apps power! This is just too much if this research is anything to go by.

nudge
http://makingmoneywithandroid.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=192

Thanks Nalo. I had not seen that but i guess the whole issue is gaining momentum and we will be carefully monitoring to see how this unfolds.

I see that GPS can eat up battery fairly quickly, but why use this for location based ads? Surely the more battery friendly network provider is sufficient enough? Unless the ads being delivered need such accuracy? Seems overkill to me anyway.

I think GPS would be an overkill for most parts of the world. In the US though, and to a lesser degree in other major centres in Europe, there is quite a bit of geo-specific data and advertising available on a very local level. So with GPS enabled you might get an ad for a pizza shop just across the road, whereas the network-based location would only be able to recommend shops within a mile radius.

“They say”: The plan was to use GPS to display the user very relevant ads - like special prices at mcdonalds around the corner.

It’s a nice idea but I dont think any advertiser is currently using this really. Maybe that comes interesting in the future.

In admob you can just spare the GPS permission, it is not needed.

The article is quite interesting, however, I have noticed from my own experience that there are no applications that contribute to saving battery life - gps or multimedia, paid or free, they all are able to instantly kill your battery.

Unless people start buying apps on Google Play (doubtful), free apps with ads or some kind of third party SDK are here to stay

I would be more worried about the amount of your data plan ads use than batter life. This actually costs you money, and not too many large carriers offer unlimited data anymore.

Also: every single SDK fails gracefully if no GPS is available. Some devices do not have GPS capability and every users with half a clue keeps GPS switched off simply because it chews power.

Claiming ads = GPS = bad battery is silly IMO.