Research suggests free apps use more battery than paid ones

Yes we know that there are some users out there who’d rather download a free app rather than paying $0.99 for the full version, but it seems that according to studies conducted by researchers at Purdue University, free apps such as Angry Birds actually use up more battery power than their fully paid version. According to the research, about 10-30% of the energy is spent powering the game itself, but apparently another 45% of the energy is spent uploading user location data with GPS, thus allowing the game to download location-appropriate ads over the user’s 3G data connection.

Adding on to that, once the download has been complete, the 3G connection remains open for an additional 10 seconds, and this “tail energy” will go on and consume an additional 28% energy. Abhinav Pathak, one of the researchers, blames this on the inefficiencies of third-party source code and will be presenting his research at the EuroSys conference in Bern, Switzerland next month. While we’ve never actually attempted this for ourselves, any of our readers out there experience anything like this before?