New “Hush” App Promises to Save Android Battery Life By 20%

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2015-12-11 14:16

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For most of us, battery life is the number one problem on Android. Infact, if battery life isn’t your number one problem, then I’m genuinely curious tolearn what is.
A new app called Hush promises to save your battery life in ascientifically-backed way. This isn’t some random app created by a shoddydevelopment team that really just wants ad clicks: this is a legitimate appcreated by researchers at Purdue University.
Hush is a free tool that prevents power-hungry apps from checking forupdates in the background. Best of all, it only targets apps that you don’t useregularly.
Researchers came up for the idea for the app after finding that Androidapps account for 45.9% of all battery usage, with 29% of that usage takingplace while your phone’s display is turned off.
In other words, your smartphone is draining a lot of battery life whenit’s not even in use.


Android Apps Launch and Refresh Themselves Throughout the Day
As you may or may not know, Android apps constantly refresh themselvesthroughout the day. This ensures they’re up-to-date and ready-to-use at alltimes.
Unfortunately, these updates occur without your knowledge or explicitpermission. They can occur when your handset is locked, for example.
After installing Hush, you can reduce the battery usage taking placewhile your phone is asleep from 29% to just 16%. In other words, instead ofhaving 29% of your phone’s app usage taking place while the screen is off,you’ll get just 16%.

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Hush works by optimizing apps. As team researcher Prof Charlie Huexplains:“Apps wake the phone up periodically duringscreen-off to do useful things, but then afterward, they should let the phonego back to sleep. “They are not letting the phone go back to sleep because ofsoftware bugs and, specifically, due to the incorrect use of Android powercontrol application programming interfaces called wakelocks.”By fixing lazy designs and other optimization problems, Hush can savehours of battery life on your average day: during testing, phones running Hushlasted about 15% longer than phones without it.Ultimately, researchers want to “double the battery life” forsmartphones.

How to Download Hush

Unfortunately, Hush is not available on the Google Play Store. You’llneed to download it from Github, where it’s available for free download here: https://github.com/hushnymous