Free mobile apps with ads drain
your smartphone's battery faster, cause it to run slower, and use more network
data, scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have found.
When compared to apps without
ads, the researchers found that apps with ads use an average of 16 percent more
energy than apps without ads.
That lowers the battery life of a
smartphone from 2.5 to 2.1 hours on average - or down to 1.7 hours at the high
end of energy usage.
Researchers at the University of
Southern California, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and Queen's University
in Canada said that a phone's Central Processing Unit (CPU) is like its brain -
and ads eat up a lot of that brain power, slowing it down.
Apps with ads take up an average
of 48 percent more CPU time - 22 percent more memory use and 56 percent greater
CPU utilization (the amount of time the CPU was used).
Since the ads themselves are
content that has to be downloaded, apps with ads cause smartphones to use much
more data - up to 100 percent more, in some cases.
On average, these apps use around
79 percent more network data.
Together, these frustrations and
expenses led users to rate apps with ads lower - costing them an overall
average of .003 stars on a five-star rating scale.
"In absolute terms, this is
very low, but in the crowded and competitive world of apps it's a huge
difference. It can make the difference between your app getting downloaded or
going unnoticed," said William Halfond, co-corresponding author of the
study at the University of Southern California.
Halfond along with Meiyappan
Nagappan of RIT and other colleagues compared 21 top apps from the past year -
culled from a list of 10,750 that had been in the top 400 of each of Google
Play's 30 categories from January to August of last year.
They then measured their effect
on phones using analysis tools loaded onto a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone.
Next, Halfond said he hopes to
create models that will allow app developers to predict how well their products
will be received by the public - both with and without ads.
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