By Greg Boyle

An interesting report into the power consumption of mobile apps has just been released by researchers at Purdue University in the USA.

The report claims, among other things, that third party advertising in free apps drains more power than what is used while actually using the functions of the app itself.

Power consumption or battery drain is the #1 issue the majority of smartphone users. A recent Trend Micro study of Android smartphone users saw over 60% of users say their #1 concern was the battery draining too fast and the inability to know in advance, how much device resource apps would use.

The report focuses on 21 apps from Android and Windows Phone, and includes 10 major titles such as Angry Birds and Facebook. They suggest that in Angry Birds only 20% of the power consumption is actual game play.

This is quite an alarming discovery as our own analysis engine, the cloud based mobile app reputation technology, shows that Angry Birds has a good power consumption rating. Essentially meaning that other advertising supported apps with less advanced coding and development techniques are probably draining a lot more power. The Facebook app for Android doesn’t fair quite so well with an “average” rating along with 74% of apps, while only 4% of all free apps scanned have a poor battery reputation.

As one of the major issues people are facing is not knowing how much precious juice an app will use before they download it, Trend Micro has made available a new app that leverages the cloud. It uses mobile app reputation technology to advise Android smartphone users of the power consumption reputation of apps before they are used.

Trend Micro Longevity for Android is currently in Beta and available for free from the Google Play store (formerly Android market), it can be downloaded from http://tiny.cc/80wgbw.

I work for Trend Micro and opinions expressed here are my own.

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