It's another situation which should work well if everyone does the right thing. It's the classic "Tragedy of the Commons." Apple solves this through dictatorship, which has its own drawbacks. The "free market" way to solve this problem is to make such costs visible. Someone should start an Android app power benchmarking service, with a rating fee and with specific ratings and application classes. (One would expect a realtime GPS app to use more power than a non-networked task manager, for example.)
