There's thousands of tips out there for increasing battery life, but consumers still keep discovering that the iPhone, or any other smartphone, doesn't have enough juice to last them a full day. Well, Abhinav Pathak conducted a research study at Purdue in hope of finding a hidden culprit of reduced battery life. And what he found is truly unexpected; in-app ads are draining your battery.
Pathak's team of reasearchers developed a program called Eprof determines what functions of an app are using most energy. He then tried running it on 4 apps with in-app advertising: Angry Birds Free, Facebook, New York Times, and Chess Free. He discovered that 65%-75% of the battery power the apps used were spent finding your location and other information, and sending the info to the app so that it could target better ads at you. Only 10%-30% of the app's energy was spent running the "core functions" of the app. So next time you're wondering why your battery is dropping so quickly, just pay for some of those free apps.
