Which apps will drain your battery and data plan? Verizon’s got a list | Hacker News Reader

Which apps will drain your battery and data plan? Verizon’s got a list

gigaom.com

18 pointsiProject8 comments

I think their security rating system is more than a bit wrong. They rank badness using star ratings, which imply to users that anything above 1-star is still acceptable (you'd still see a 3-star movie or eat at a restaurant with a 3-star rating on Yelp, right?). And in their view, a 1-star rating is something that will physically damage the device.

http://support.verizonwireless.com/information/app_ranking/c...

A 4-star rating seems to me like describing an app that gathers analytics without a stated privacy policy. The offenses necessary to earn a 3-star rating in their book look like things which should be absolutely, positively, dealbreakers, but by using a star rating it communicates to users "hey it's acceptable but not as bad as it could be."

Battery life and data usage are things that can clearly be ranked on a continuum, and those are things where users can accept tradeoffs if it means playing a fun game or streaming content. But for security, bad is bad. They really need to ditch the star rating and use a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" system, where any security transgression leads to a thumbs-down.

For battery usage, I've gotten some good info from the Carat app. http://carat.cs.berkeley.edu/ On iOS and Android. As their site says, "Carat is a free app that tells you what is using up the battery of your mobile device, whether that's normal, and what you can do about it. After running Carat for about a week, you will start to receive personalized recommendations for improving your battery life. Carat is a research project based out of the AMP Lab in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, collaborating with the University of Helsinki."

Certainly Verizon sees interesting data, but Carat has been really helpful to me.

I see many recommending Onavo. I've had bad experiences with their "Extend" app: it proxied my data, often creating dropped connections, and created conflicts with VPN. I haven't tried Count, however.

Verizon engineers? But android and ios already gather statistics on every app's battery consumption, connection usage and cpu time. I'd be surprised if Google doesn't already collect this data from android devices. Would be nice to see it integrated with Play store.

Their main complaint about games is that they don't allow sleep mode. Brilliant.

Well, I think Verizon's point is that some games never let the device go into sleep mode even when paused, inactive or running in the background. I get the impression that Verizon compiled its rating by comparing actual resource consumption compared to "expected" resource consumption, which is probably a fairly relative term. For instance you expect Netflix to consume a lot of data and run down your battery when you're actually watching a movie, but you don't expect a game to do the same when you're not playing it.

-- Kevin F (the article's author)

Ranking multiple measures in a stack of stars/circles without labeled 'better / worse' margins seems like a pretty terrible data visualization.

For me, Onavo Count is the best way to monitor my data usage. Available for both Android and iPhone.

iOS 6.1 should be on that list in my experience.

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