HOW FREE APPS DRAIN YOU Those ads on your free apps are the reason you have to keep reaching for the charger, writes R Krishna

HOW FREE APPS DRAIN YOU

Those ads on your free apps are the reason you have to keep reaching for the charger,

Angry Birds, one of the most popular games on smartphones, released its latest version, Angry Birds Space, last week. The game was available for $0.99 on the iPhone App Store, while there were two versions released for Android users - an ad-supported free version and the other for $0.99. At the time of writing, the paid version had clocked 10,000 downloads. The free version — 5 million. I am one of the 5 million users. ‘Why pay for an app, when it’s available for free?’ has been my motto while using apps and services on the internet and smartphone. Sure the ads are irritating, but that’s a small price to pay for playing a game for free, right? But as it turns out there’s more to ads than the minor inconvenience they cause while using an app. Hunger for power A bunch of researchers at Purdue University developed an app called eprof, which measured how much energy an app consumes. They then put to test Angry Birds, the Facebook app, and the native browser on Android among a few others. The results were shocking. Of the total energy consumed by Angry Birds, only 25% was used to play the game. The rest? It was spent on displaying ads in the top right corner. I tend to ignore the ads, but if you observe, they keep changing. This means the ad module is continuously downloading the data from some server over internet, and to do that the 3G/GPRS circuitry on your phone keeps drawing power. Plus, energy is also spent on sharing the rough geographical location of the user in order to serve targeted ads. What this means is that without the ads the consumption of power would be far lesser. Battery life is an important factor for smartphones in general and Android phones in particular. As it is Android users like me rarely step out of the house without their chargers. Ads draining battery certainly can’t be good news. As Y Charlie Hu, one of the researchers, puts it, “A smartphone battery is generally expected to last a day before recharging, but we’re hearing about mysterious instances where the battery runs out in a few hours. Users have been complaining about this on Internet forums.” ‘Insidious’ ads While Hu and his team focused on battery life, another group of researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) studied what ad modules meant for an Android phone’s security and a user’s privacy. The study included the top ad modules on Android and found that they had access to the same information on the phone as the app. According to the study, nearly half of the ad modules could access the phone’s IMEI number, a unique number that is used to identify your phone. By tracking the IMEI number, ad modules can get information on the kind of apps you have installed on your phone and accordingly serve you ads. One ad module called Sosceo accessed a user’s call history and transmitted them to the internet. Another ad module called Mobus read through SMSes to determine which text messaging service centre they use. Sosceo or Mobus may not be well-known companies, but they are among the top 100 ad modules that may be serving ads in the free apps you use. A way around the ads So is it time to empty your pockets by buying each and every app? Well, it isn’t all bad news for users. There are still tons of free apps out there without ads. Then are the ‘freemiuim’ apps which allow you to use the app, but reserve a few features for premium (aka paid) versions — these apps are usually ad-free. You could also switch off GPRS/3G network before using an ad-supported app. The downside is that you won’t get any real-time updates like new email or new posts on your social networking account. Of course, buying apps that you find very useful is also a good option. This way you are forced to make a choice and be a more discerning consumer. This in a way also works as positive feedback to those developers who are doing a good job of building the cool apps we all love. Finally, you can still choose to use free apps with ads. I know I am not going to stop using them. But do keep the risks at the back of your mind. And if you are an Android user, don’t forget to carry your charger to work.