Recent studies suggest that free mobile applications, which use third-party services to display advertising, consume more battery life. By using special tools to monitor energy use, researches came to the conclusion that 75% of an application’s energy consumption was spent on powering advertisements.

Abhinav Pathak, author of the research, claimed that app developers must optimize their energy consumption. Free applications usually come up with built-in advertisements, the only method for developers to make money without charging for the initial download.

The research conducted by Pathak took place at Purdue University in Indiana, U.S. and mainly focused on popular applications such as Angry Birds or Facebook. Researches were made on different devices except iPhones. iPhones were excluded from tests due to built-into restrictions by Apple on the mobile operating system.

Looking into Angry Birds, only 20% of the total energy consumption was used by the application to actually run the game. Forty-five percent of the energy was instead used to track the location of the user in order to serve targeted advertising.

Tests were carried out on Android and Windows Phone 6.5 devices that use a 3G connection. Out of the total of tested applications, a nearly 10 second “3G tail” was left. The Internet connection was left opened for 10 seconds after the information was downloaded, to allow advertising to show onto the display. In Angry Birds application, this “3G tail” accounted for over 25% of the application’s total consumption of energy.