Carat is a nice new app from some fine people over at UC Berkeley?s electrical engineering and computer science departments. This isn?t just an app killer thought, it tells you how much battery life can be saved by shutting down apps and can give you personalized battery life saving recommendations.
Carat breaks down recommendations into two categories, bugs and hogs. These are just labels and aren?t meant to say anything on the bugs or hogs is anything to be scared of because usually they are not. The bugs are usually apps that sap much more power from you than everyone else because they may be malfunctioning so Carat will tell you to restart or redownload them. An example that was given is an app that would not use a lot of power but was trying to activate the GPS on the phone over and over again. Hogs are apps that are just made to use tons of power or are just running in the background doing nothing special for you such as a streaming music player that is off but still running.
Here are just a few things that have been learned by using the Carat app:
? In an initial test with just 100 users, it found 35 apps with energy bugs proving how badly users and developers need Carat?s data.
? Carat has since found thousands of instances of these energy bugs on devices in the wild
? Skype, Yelp, and Pandora are some of the most popular energy hogs. They?re not necessarily inefficient, they just require more power than most apps and might be the best to temporarily kill off.