Why Your Phone Battery Dies So Fast

via The Surprising Reason Your Phone’s Battery Life Drains.

Sick of watching your battery icon seemingly go as fast as a stoplight from green to yellow to red? It could well be all the apps you have installed — even the ones you aren’t using.

A team of researchers at Purdue University released a study to TechNewsDaily that thoroughly examines what dozens of popular apps are doing on Android phones, and what many of them are doing wrong. (Though the study was only on Google’s Android operating system, the researchers say that they can do the same for Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows phone operating systems.)

Apps turn on parts of the phone, such as the processor, the GPS or the camera, when they need them, which is normal. But by digging into the code of apps, the researchers often found what they call “no-sleep energy bugs,” mistakes in the program that fail to turn the components off when they are done. Unlike computers, which are often plugged in and “awake” most of the time, smartphones try whenever possible to be in a “sleep” mode to save precious battery life.