{"id":4394,"date":"2012-06-18T15:05:44","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T19:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4394"},"modified":"2014-03-10T15:35:43","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T19:35:43","slug":"beware-the-vampire-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4394","title":{"rendered":"Beware the vampire app!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a heads-up for all smartphone owners out there.  A few days ago I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technewsdaily.com\/4422-buggy-apps-killing-smartphone-battery.html\">Buggy Apps Killing Your Smartphone Battery<\/a>. And I can now certify that the problem is real.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d been having what looked like serious battery issues on my HTC G2 for about the last 60 days. It was unclear whether the battery had lost its ability to hold a full charge or whether it was somehow draining at an abnormally high rate.  But it was pretty bad &#8211; forcing me towards getting a new phone before I really wanted to.<\/p>\n<p>Then I read this article.  Short version: buggy apps can eat the battery, presumably through failing to terminate or sleep themselves properly when they should.  OK, what the heck &#8211; I walked though my download list, deleting a bunch of apps I had downloaded and then decided weren&#8217;t interesting, but failed to delete.<\/p>\n<p>To my delight, this cleared the problem up immediately.  My phone once again readily takes a full charge and can run for a day or more on it.  I haven&#8217;t been able to pin down which apps were the problem &#8211; I deleted about a dozen &#8211; but I can say this much: none of them was one I&#8217;m actually using.  Hacker&#8217;s Keyboard is OK, the Angry Birds games and Coloroid and Spider are OK, the Fandango client is OK, Nexus Torch and OpenRecorder are OK, and (despite a hint in the article) none of the preinstalled Android stuff seems to have been implicated in the excess power drain.<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230;if you think your battery is going south, don&#8217;t panic.  Houseclean all those junk apps off your phone and see what happens. It worked for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a heads-up for all smartphone owners out there. A few days ago I read Buggy Apps Killing Your Smartphone Battery. And I can now certify that the problem is real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4394"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5382,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4394\/revisions\/5382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}