So This Is What’s Draining the iPhone’s Battery

A computer whiz at Purdue University, Indiana, formed a team to carry out a study and determine the major cause of battery drainage on smartphones.

Abhinav Pathak and his tech-savvy buds found (PDF) that between “65%-75% of energy in free apps is spent in third-party advertising modules.” The tests were conducted on non-iOS devices, but they should apply the same on Apple’s platforms.

They made an example out of the immensely popular Angry Birds, which comes in free and paid variants – and we can safely assume it’s the free game that most people downloaded.

They found that the core part of Angry Birds Free sucks about 20 percent of the energy it uses for the game. The remainder goes on location-tracking and serving ads.

In other words, the $0.99 you’d otherwise have paid for the full game now goes to your electric company, and later on, the smartphone vendor whose device you’ll choose next because your existing phone has crap battery life.

Posted in: Mobile Phone, Review, Software