A new app for Android will extend battery life by shutting down apps when a phone is asleep, prioritising apps you regularly use, and curbing others to save power.
The tool - Hush - was created by researchers at Purdue University, who claim that apps are responsible for draining 28.9 per cent of battery power while a phone's screen is turned off. With Hush, they believe this can be reduced to 16 per cent.
Y. Charlie Hu, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, said: "This was the first large-scale study of smartphone energy drain 'in the wild,' or in everyday use by consumers.
"During screen-off, the phone hardware should enter the sleep state, draining close to zero power. Apps wake the phone up periodically during screen-off to do useful things, but then afterward, they should let the phone go back to sleep. They are not letting the phone go back to sleep because of software bugs and, specifically, due to the incorrect use of Android power control applications programming interfaces called wakelocks."
Hush identifies the apps that users don't use as often as other apps like Facebook, and chooses which functions to suppress while the phone's screen is turned off.
The research was conducted by Purdue University and startup Mobile Enerlytics, looking at 2,000 Samsung Galaxy S3/S4 phones across 191 mobile operators in 61 countries.
"The big picture is that we want to double the battery life for smartphones," Hu added. "This is going to be a non-trivial journey because much of the battery drain is caused by various apps when the screen is on and also legitimate maintenance functions."
MIT and Samsung recently revealed they were working together to create solid state batteries that would last 'forever', with between 20 to 30 per cent greater capacity than standard batteries.
The app is only available to developers at the moment via GitHub, according to a Reddit forum.
