Battery-Drainer Android

Jiro

Jiro

If You Know What I Mean
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Study: Free Android Apps Can Steal Your Phone's Power | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
A study by Purdue University and Microsoft has revealed that as much as 75 percent of the power a smartphone application draws is used for third-party ad serving.

The study examined several popular smartphone applications, including the Android browser and Angry Birds, Rovio's popular smartphone game. The New York Times app's download manager also appeared to consume a great deal of energy even after its main task, that of downloading the news, had completed.
The study has implications for users who avoid paying money for apps that eliminate the ads for a small fee, suggesting that users may pay in battery life what they avoid transferring from their bank account.

Due to "page length," however, the study only presented its conclusion on the Android OS and apps, and not the Windows Mobile OS.

The study used a tool called eprof to conclude that most smartphone apps spend the bulk of their time performing I/O functions, such as accessing 3G data or Wi-Fi. The study found that many apps have so-called "tails" that leave a device operating in full-power mode even when the app completes.
Within Rovio's Angry Birds, for example, the third-party Flurry ad network consumes 45 percent of the power consumed by the app; within Flurry's 45 percent, GPS use to identify the user's location consumed 15 percent of the energy, and the 3G "tail" an additional 24 percent.

Just opening an Android search page in the native browser can consume 2,000 μAH, the study found, of which 31 percent and 16 percent were used for 3G and GPS purposes - the latter to identify the user's location. Browsing CNN required 2,400 μAH, requiring more data download but without the need to establish the user's location.

In one example, a sample app authored by the study's authors ramped up, engaged in a handshake with a remote server, and sent 5 packets of data, for a total of for a total of 127 μAH worth of energy. But even after the app's completion, the 3G radio stayed on for an additional 6 seconds, wasting a total of 187 μAH, or 57 percent of the total app energy. The study also found that the "tail" also triggered if the routine was delayed by five seconds after the original connection. A similar behavior, called a "wakelock," was a bug that tricked a component into a high-power state and kept it there. Wakelock bugs were found inside Android's Mail program and the Facebook app, among others, the study found.

Although the study made some provocative observations about ad networks' use of power within an application, the study concluded that most of the energy an application used was confined to I/O operations, and that those operations typically were just used by a few "bundles" of routines. The study advised further research in using eprof in conjunction with compiler techniques to develop "energy optimizers' for smartphone apps.
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VacationGuy234 said:
Why would you believe Microsoft would support an honest study of Android?
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like I said before..... you surely do make a lot of bad assumptions :lol:

..... and I don't own either Android or Microsoft phones :lol: and beside - did you miss the "Purdue University" part? it has a high reputation.
 
Jiro said:
like I said before..... you surely do make a lot of bad assumptions :lol:

..... and I don't own either Android or Microsoft phones :lol: and beside - did you miss the "Purdue University" part? it has a high reputation.
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Someone funds a study at Purdue and you believe they are going to give an adverse finding to the those who funded it?

Basic business class will teach you that you don't write anything that doesn't support the business, only favorable things get written.
 
VacationGuy234 said:
Someone funds a study at Purdue and you believe they are going to give an adverse finding to the those who funded it?

Basic business class will teach you that you don't write anything that doesn't support the business, only favorable things get written.
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and where did it say Microsoft funded everything?

and are you able to find anything that would dispute this report?
 
Jiro said:
and where did it say Microsoft funded everything?

and are you able to find anything that would dispute this report?
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I'm not attacking you personally just the premise that the article/study could be biased.

As for where it says, look at the first line, "A study by Purdue University and Microsoft". I take this to be a joint venture mostly likely funded by the later, IMO.
 
On a personal level, my sidekick battery isn't great, but you have to admit it's a good marketing angle for knocking another companies product.

It's a known fact today's batteries can't handle the power required by smartphones.
 
VacationGuy234 said:
I'm not attacking you personally just the premise that the article/study could be biased.
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yes. I'm aware of that and I'm teaching you how to argue the validity of such report like a decent professional.

VacationGuy234 said:
As for where it says, look at the first line, "A study by Purdue University and Microsoft". I take this to be a joint venture mostly likely funded by the later, IMO.
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in order to question the validity of this study, you need to analyze and bring up the points that they conveniently overlooked it in order to fudge it. you cannot just simply say - "oh of course!!!! it's funded by Microsoft!" and then have no validity to back that up.
 
Jiro said:
like I said before..... you surely do make a lot of bad assumptions :lol:

..... and I don't own either Android or Microsoft phones :lol: and beside - did you miss the "Purdue University" part? it has a high reputation.
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You won't own either Android or M$ Phones then you are smart. :wave:
 
VacationGuy234 said:
On a personal level, my sidekick battery isn't great, but you have to admit it's a good marketing angle for knocking another companies product.

It's a known fact today's batteries can't handle the power required by smartphones.
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Good marketing? Yeah it's good for low-tech people. I never own sidekick all in my life. Even my old Treo 650 is better than sidekick for better coverage, fast, durable and nice touchscreen. No matter how many times you drop Treo 650 and it still good. Sidekick few drops then it's done.
 
Jiro said:
yes. I'm aware of that and I'm teaching you how to argue the validity of such report like a decent professional.


in order to question the validity of this study, you need to analyze and bring up the points that they conveniently overlooked it in order to fudge it. you cannot just simply say - "oh of course!!!! it's funded by Microsoft!" and then have no validity to back that up.
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Good marketing science, like any good story, is made up of partial truth, but on the whole it's bullshit.
 
VacationGuy234 said:
Good marketing science, like any good story, is made up of partial truth, but on the whole it's bullshit.
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so..... is there anything you can find in the report that is bullshit?
 
The Highlander said:
Good marketing? Yeah it's good for low-tech people. I never own sidekick all in my life. Even my old Treo 650 is better than sidekick for better coverage, fast, durable and nice touchscreen. No matter how many times you drop Treo 650 and it still good. Sidekick few drops then it's done.
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I like the new Sidekick4 which is Android controlled. The keyboard is why I stick with it. I don't like the other non QWERTY keyboards out there.
 
VacationGuy234 said:
I like the new Sidekick4 which is Android controlled. The keyboard is why I stick with it. I don't like the other non QWERTY keyboards out there.
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I actually saw that 2 days ago. I didn't know Sidekick's still alive :eek3:

initially it looks cool and improved but... why sidekick??? what's wrong with Blackberry?
 
I wonder what were the parameters used in the study's study.. For example, HTC's SENSE framework is already known to be a major battery drain, as much as 10-20% more drain than AOSP androids. AOSP can get ~2 days fairly easily without sacrificing much, as much as 3+ days if the person uses it lightly. Sense can rarely top 1-2 days itself.

If a person were look in the code to revert HTC sense back to stock open source, they would need to remove over 1000 files and thousands of lines of code, just for the way some things are optimized like camera, live wallpapers, or sense widget apk's.
Meanwhile if you compare to an android framework like the Nexus series, the battery life will be fairly much longer since it's barebones OS, just plain like iOS or BBOS.

The article doesn't mention which framework were they using, each one of them operates differently depending on how the manufacturer wrote it. Did they do Samsung touchwiz, HTC sense, Google AOSP, Motorola Motoblur? Which one?

With Apple and Blackberry, their OS are completely restricted to only one kind for all devices, so there is only one flavor. With android, to be accurate they need to take into account the variations. Sort of like comparing between video cards. There might be 5 companies that make an Nvidia GTX260, the GPU is the same, but some may be slightly faster or slower, or more power consumption than another.

It took me awhile to understand this. Once a person starts looking into android source code for each variation, you can start seeing all differences and why they occur.
 
Here's what I mean. Due to the fragmentation in android, you see too many variations by each company and their device:

Kernel source code for HTC EVO 3D:
HTCdev - HTC Kernel Source Code and Binaries
HTC EVO 3D (Sprint WWE) - GB MR - 2.6.35 kernel source code 89.3 MB

Kernel source code for AOSP (Code Auroa Forums), used in AOSP series like Nexus:
https://www.codeaurora.org/gitweb/quic/la/?p=kernel/msm.git;a=summary around ~60-70MB.

This doesn't even include the other partitions like recovery or the ROMs.

A stock HTC sense rom can be over 200-300 MB while AOSP built from source can be 100MB or less, I've built it with as little as 60MB before.
 
Jiro said:
I actually saw that 2 days ago. I didn't know Sidekick's still alive :eek3:

initially it looks cool and improved but... why sidekick??? what's wrong with Blackberry?
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I don't like the keyboard and the kick is $29.99 a month full data.
 
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