The best things in life are free, right? Well, in the case of free apps for your Android smart devices, maybe not. Here’s a look at some reasons, perhaps, why free apps are actually murdering your smart-phone’s battery.
Revenge of the Nerds
Everyone believes they have a special skill, is sure it’s highly marketable, and deep down knows it’s worth a huge annual salary. Sadly, these very same people can’t understand why no one is banging down their door and throwing huge sums of money at them. These people are known as free app developers and they’re a growing segment of the unemployed population.
Failure after failure to get anyone excited about their apps that show you the correct length to cut your cat’s fur, or how to make origami napkins for your dinner party leads far too many of these disgruntled and disheveled developers to create apps that are essentially viruses.
They package their battery-killing app with bright colors and wrap them in shiny bows and hang the old FREE price tag on them. Unsuspecting smart-phone users download them by the millions and then complain wildly to their cellular phone providers about the lousy battery life of their new phone. Meanwhile, these battery-killing disgruntled app developers are laughing all the way to the proverbial bank to cash all those non-existent checks.
The Semaphore and Smoke Signal Society
Not unlike other secret societies like Skull and Bones, Freemasons, and the Tea Party, the Semaphore and Smoke Signal Society, which recently joined ranks to double their group’s size to an even dozen members, has had it with wild-eyed telecom engineers trying to take over the world one wireless device at a time.
“We’re losing the ability to communicate visually and cryptically,” said SSS Society President and semaphore aficionado Rube Cartwright.
Rest assured they are behind much of this battery-killing technology. It sounds fantastic, but conspiracy theorists around the world have speculated for some time now that these old flag-wavers and dot-dashers have long desired a return to the old ways. Killing phone batteries, one at a time, is their way of showing the world whose boss. Hmmm…I wonder if there’s a smoke signal app. Maybe Rosetta Stone has something?
Smartphone Battery Makers
Another likely source of these battery-killing apps is battery manufacturers themselves! Consider this: You buy a new smart-phone and it works great for a while. Then you happen onto one of these apps, probably something to do with cleaning up your smart-phone to make it faster, and BAM! Your phone starts acting like molasses in January. Every hour or so you notice it’s wheezing and the “low battery” light is flashing.
You complain to your friends at lunch, and later to your spouse while ignoring Jay Leno, and realize the solution is a new battery! That’s their plan. If you and every other smartphone user purchase just one more battery each year, then you’ve effectively doubled worldwide battery sales! It’s the cheapest marketing plan in the world, and they’ve made you do all the work.
See? It’s not too hard to imagine they snatched up the patent for a smart-phone battery that will last a lifetime on a single charge, burned it and buried the ashes.
The “Just for Fun” Crowd
Sometimes people do things just to get a laugh, like shaving off half a mustache while sleeping on the couch, or painting “just buried” on a hearse. When these “just for fun” guys also happen to be smartphone app developer, we have to be on our collective guard against apps they create just to get a laugh.
These guys develop the most interesting, desirable, and talked about apps on the Market. They’re useful tools like streaming music apps that organize your music into playlists; they’re fun apps like word games you play with your friends; they’re business tools like document viewers and language translators.
These “just for fun” developers load their apps with pop-up ads, which we gladly accept as the tradeoff for the price we didn’t pay because we’re not socialists who expect people to create these things for free. No! We’re capitalists and understand that advertisers need to make money too!
Free Apps ? You Get What You Pay For
In the end, and we’re loathe to admit it, it’s the pop-up ads that are murdering our smart-phone batteries. They steal lots of battery power every time they show up on your phone’s screen, and can literally cut your expected battery life in half.
If we weren’t so cheap and always on the lookout for something free, we might thwart all of this by reaching into our communal piggy banks and ponying up a few dollars for the apps we find useful, entertaining, and worth our while. Something to consider, eh; nah…just kidding, FREE apps rule!
Author Bio: This is a guest post from Tyler. Tyler is a tech writer for SatelliteInternet.com
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