Two reasons why free apps aren't always free...
Reason #1 - Ads In Free Apps Drain Your Battery
This is a Mac page link, but the study was done on Android and Windows mobile phones...
In-App Ads Drain Up To 75% Of Your Phone's Battery
"Free apps that display in-app advertising are sucking the life out of your cellphone’s battery. A team led by Abhinav Pathak, a computer boffin at Purdue University, Indiana, found around “65%-75% of energy in free apps is spent in third-party advertising modules.
The problems come when the apps switch on power-draining devices like GPS, the camera or SD card readers. Pathak and his team found that Angry Birds, for example, spends just 20 percent of the energy it uses on the game itself. The rest goes on tracking the user’s location and serving location-targeted ads.
Translation: Free apps may actually cost you more than paid apps in the end.
So instead of cheaping out and whining that a $2 app is 'expensive', why not just pay for it? Because the alternative seems to be that you’ll be paying for it anyway, in terms of wasted electricity and annoyingly short battery life: Some of these apps can drain your battery in just 90 minutes."
A humble suggestion from the developers: Battery Notifier Pro BT :-)
Reason #2 - Privacy Concerns
Giving Up Your Privacy For "Free" Apps
"Some popular 'free' smartphone applications come with a surprising price: They tell marketers the users' locations and can legally snatch their contact lists and even their photographs, a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers found.
Jason Hong, an associate professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and Norman Sadeh, a computer science professor, studied the 100 most popular, free Android phone apps and found that more than half gather information about users.
They discovered users often were surprised to find popular apps gathered information from them, including their locations, the unique identification numbers of their devices, their contact lists and in some cases their photographs.
Over 90 percent of users are surprised that Angry Birds is getting their location data. Likewise, users were unaware that Brightest Flashlight -- a free app that turns a smartphone into a flashlight -- collects the location of users fumbling in the dark.
"During my talks, I can actually see people deleting apps," Hong said.
A Pew Research Center survey of 2,254 app users last fall found 54 percent decided not to install an app because of privacy concerns, while 30 percent reported they deleted an app for the same reason.
California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris released a report recommending app developers take steps to be more clear about the information their apps collect.
Sadeh said the researchers' findings make a case for clearer, concise disclosures on issues users find most important, rather than lengthy statements that pop up after a user has clicked to download an app."
So in an effort to be clear and concise...
Battery Notifier BT Free and Battery Notifier Pro BT only require these two permissions:
Hardware controls
control vibrator
System tools
automatically start at boot
And we don't collect or share information from your device with anyone.
UPDATE 3/31/14 :
Both of our apps now require three permissions.
To find out why, see: New permission added
