
Without ads, Android apps could be more than twice as power-efficient - GreekOphion
http://theverge.com/2012/3/19/2884902/android-apps-battery-efficiency-study
======
andybak
Someone on Reddit bothered to read the actual paper and found the following:

4.4 Accounting for High Rate Components The FSM power model does not cover RAM
and Organic LED screen (OLED) since these components are accessed at much
higher rates (and hence called high rate components) resulting in high
overheads in event based modeling. [...] we leave RAM/OLED accounting as
future work.

If I'm understanding that correctly it's a rather big factor to decide to
casually ignore.

source:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/r39lz/free_apps_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/r39lz/free_apps_eat_up_your_phone_battery_just_sending/c42rn24)

~~~
jeremiak
Coming from a mobile ad network myself, we read the paper and there are a few
points we'd like to make. Mainly that the study only tested the first 33
seconds of the app launching, which is the shortest session time I can think
of, especially for a chess game...

Read the rest: [http://www.inmobi.com/devblog/2012/03/21/battery-usage-of-
mo...](http://www.inmobi.com/devblog/2012/03/21/battery-usage-of-mobile-
advertising/)

------
ge0rg
Why do "journalists" always forget to link to the primary source?

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mzh/eurosys-2012....](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mzh/eurosys-2012.pdf) is the original research paper and also
provides interesting insights for smartphone app developers.

[edit] Oops, I completely ignored that orange/light grey markup. Must have
been an over-active form of ad-blindness.

~~~
nextparadigms
Since when is Microsoft so interested in doing Android-related research?

~~~
shantanubala
Since they started developing Windows Phone? It's a little obvious, but why
not study the design decisions of your competitors? Especially when it reveals
inefficiencies?

~~~
nextparadigms
And they thought they should just share it with the world? Please. This is
just more of Microsoft's FUD tactics to attack competitors in a dirty way.

They were also the ones to pay for that research that uncovered the first
Chrome sandbox exploit. I question their motives for all of this.

~~~
wmf
This paper was written by an intern at MSR. It's possible that it was easier
to instrument Android or it has more apps or whatever.

------
angersock
So, obviously, the solution here is to have tighter integration of ad
platforms with the underlying system, perhaps an ads repo that installed
applications can access and which is optimized for power use.

Or, you know, you could charge for your applications and stop putting ads in
altogether.

It will be a dark day, my friends, when there is _kernel support_ for
advertisements.

~~~
beatle
the ad services (Google, etc.) doesn't care about your phone's battery life as
long as they can serve their ads. They don't get anything in return if they
spend time and resources making their ads "more efficient". These companies
don't care about the user experience or providing a better product. They're in
the ads business not in the making-a-better-phone business.

as far as they're concerned your phone's battery life is a hardware/OS issue.

sad but true.

~~~
megablast
Google certainly has an interest in extending android battery life, you would
be silly to suggest anything else.

~~~
beatle
All evidence to the contrary (including this article).

~~~
timrichard
All evidence to the contrary?

Android releases since Gingerbread have made much more use of black elements
(status bar, menu shortcuts, app launcher background). Bright colours on OLEDs
are bad news for battery life.

------
dlikhten
If you are not paying for the product, you are paying in other ways, this just
puts a number on it. If you consider the implications, you are paying quite a
bit in power in addition to privacy issues.

This is why:

a) my gps AND network location is turned off 99.99% of the time.

b) I have ad-blocking software which prevents lots of this network overhead.

^^ the above is justified because it actually costs me, want to serve me ads?
fine, but not when they come at a price.

~~~
dsr_
My primary reason to get root on my Android was... well, let's be honest, like
every other HN denizen I wanted to explore and control it. But among my other
reasons was to be able to run DroidWall, an interface to iptables firewalling.

~~~
jakeonthemove
Thanks for mentioning DroidWall - I can't believe I didn't stumble onto it
myself!

------
mcritz
I'm surprised that the ad sevices aren't smarter. Wait until on wifi, cache a
bunch of ads, share those ads amongst all the apps that use your service. Is
this feasible?

~~~
brudgers
I'm not. There is no incentive for better energy utilization.

[edit] for advertizement driven software. Energy efficiency is something which
goes to the bottom line of handset manufacturers. That this research comes
from Microsoft, not Google, shows how different the incentives in regards to
energy management are for the two companies' mobile OS's.[/edit]

[edit 2]It also illustrates the problem of the commons inherent in the app
model. Lots of contact with the ad server is great for each app and poor for
overall energy efficiency.[/edit 2]

~~~
mdwrigh2
I mean, there _are_ incentives. If a battery lasts longer, a user will spend
more time in apps, which leads to more ad views.

Whether the ad companies are measuring and paying attention to this is a
different matter.

~~~
fluidcruft
They also spend more time in the app when it stutters and lags due to ad load.
/snark

Otherwise... it's just another reason to learn smali.

------
j_baker
This test was run on a Nexus One, which was released in 2010. I'd be curious
to see if they got the same results on a newer phone. I'd be willing to bet
that this is mostly because ads require more network requests, which aren't as
efficient on newer phones.

Something smells of a researcher cherry-picking a result that shows off their
tool's results in the best possible light. I suppose I don't have any way to
prove that, but I have to ask why the researcher didn't try the test on
another phone.

~~~
yuliyp
A Nexus One is a very convenient target for research because it is (a) sold
without ties to a carrier or any carrier-specific junk, and (b) flashable with
any specific system image you want, including custom AOSP builds without doing
any other work (the hardware profile for the Nexus One is shipped with AOSP).

------
ravivyas
With out a screen your phone could run for weeks.

------
majani
Could someone in ad tech please explain to me: is ad software's inefficiency
with power and load times a necessary evil, or is it some gross incompetence
from leaders in the field?

~~~
j_baker
I suspect it's neither. It's probably more that advertisers just don't care if
their ads use up too much power. Probably the same reason why there are so
many annoying Flash ads.

------
hahainternet
I'm so frustrated that this is on the BBC, on The Verge, it's everywhere. It
is TOTAL NONSENSE.

I don't even need to comment much, if you read the original research you will
quickly discover just how poor this paper is. They haven't remotely correctly
characterised it and a holistic approach would show the ridiculousness of the
claims.

People are too busy to read a few pages though, but not too busy to write a
bunch of crap and try and get ad impressions.

~~~
yew
It looks reasonable enough to me. I suppose you could quibble with some of the
details of how they assign hardware utilization to software components. Apps
with heavy same-resource utilization independent of ad serving might face some
mischaracterization, although the basic message (advertising represents a non-
negligible power drain) remains intact.

Am I missing something? I admit to having only read the paper once.

------
orbitingpluto
If an Android app requires location services and that isn't integral to the
functionality of the app, then it's bad design on the dev's part.

It's easy enough to get decent fill rates for advertisements without latex-
gloving user privacy and wasting battery life.

------
jakeonthemove
Ads are definitely not worth the $2 you save for an app that you like and use
regularly. This is just another reason why...

~~~
ajross
Very few "regular use" apps are advertising-only. All of them come in a "pro"
edition for $2 or whatever for the people who care enough to purchase. I like
the subtle platform flame, but it's poorly informed and frankly needless.
Which is just another reason why...

