The study, conducted by a team lead by Abhinav Pathak from Purdue University, analyzed the energy used by several popular free Android apps (PDF) like Angry Birds, Facebook, the New York Times, and Chess. The team developed an "energy profiler" they call "Eprof" that determines what processes within an app are using energy. The results are shocking: 65 to 75 percent of energy consumed by the free apps studied are used by third-party advertising modules within the programs. These apps continue to run in the background even when you're not actually using the app. Only 10 to 30 percent of that energy is used to power the applications' "core functions."
Apps shouldn't continue to serve you ads when you're not locking at the apps. It's a bug, or something more nefarious. According to the researchers, developers don't notice energy consumption problems—bugs or otherwise—because most apps are "energy oblivious," meaning that the developers don't pay attention to how much energy apps use. [Eurosys 2012 via New Scientist]
From what I've read, ad blockers just block the apps from being viewed. It doesn't keep the app from running and trying to show them. What you're describing implies the ad blocker actually tells the other app what to do. I highly doubt that is what's happening.
That may be true, I don't detect any significant increase in COMPAQ Presario C307NR battery life. At any rate, it's great because I hate ads.
An app like AdAway blocks Apps from downloading at all by using host files. The effect is when I was using Ad Free it blocked my emails from Newegg which is why I switched to AdAway. Some ads still aren't blocked though. In this case though while your data might be saved since it won't download the images and such, the pinging for location will still continue causing not much of a HP ProBook 4710s Laptop Battery saving.
Yeah depending on the apps behavior when encountering a failure to download ad content you could be killing your battery even more. I'm guessing diminished display activity including flash style ads more than makes up for a bunch of retries since display usage is a big SONY VGP-BPS13/S Laptop Battery waster.
The better thing to use is a firewall to block that data all together. (most) Games don't need data.
Rooted phone allow you to install powerful firewall which actually controls internet access *per application*. Say, I can set Wikipedia for full access (Wifi or 4G) but Angry Bird to no-access. This will at least eliminate unnecessary data usage and some of the power drains associated with it (on the cell radio side). Although to be fair it will not stop the app from waking the phone up and consuming CPU cycle...
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