One in four Android apps has battery draining bugs, study shows

The folks at Purdue University are at it again! This time, a research that they conducted revealed bugs in Android apps that cause severe battery drain. These so-called "no-sleep energy bugs" are caused by mishandling of power management APIs and are capable of draining a smartphone's battery in as little as five hours even when it is not being used. 

In a nutshell, a smartphone is in a power-saving idle mode by default. Its processor is in a sleep state unless an application wakes it up. Most developers use the power management APIs well, which is why their software does not put any load on the processor when that is not required. About a quarter of the apps that were tested, however, contained errors that could potentially keep the processor occupied, thus draining the smartphone's battery in no time. 

Back in March, a similar Purdue University study demonstrated how free, ad-supported Android applications had a negative effect on a smartphone's battery. It was discovered that a significant amount of the power needed to run a free app, up to 75% at times, is sucked by the advertisements that are being displayed. Even the free version of Angry Birds is affected, according to the research. About 45% of the power that the game needs is consumed by the third-party Flurry advertisement network. Of that 45%, 15% is used to acquire your location via GPS and 24% is used for transferring data online.

So think about all that the next time you take that smartphone out of your pocket and realize that its battery had died. A recently installed application could be causing all the trouble. 

source: Purdue University via Engadget