When you decide to get yourself one of those free apps for your smartphone, you usually recognize that you’re paying the price by having to deal with in-app advertising, but did you know that you’re also paying in the form of increased power consumption?

A study was recently conducted by Purdue University and Microsoft, revealing that as much as 70% of the power consumed from playing the free games on your smartphone is actually attributed to downloading the advertisements and tracking your usage. This isn’t always the case and I’m sure that the physics engine in Angry Birds sucks up some juice too, but that’s still a lot of precious battery life being sucked away to encourage you to sign up for some dating site.

Naturally, if the free app of your choosing also requires a GPS connection, as well as either 3G or WiFi, these likely drain your battery too. The thing is that the information gathered through those means could also be used to process and funnel the right ads your way. To be fair, the tests were run on some older hardware–the Android-powered HTC Magic and Passion, as well as the WinMo-fueled HTC Tytn II–but it should mostly hold true for newer devices too.

They tested a total of 21 apps, including newspaper apps, photo uploaders, and games. In the case of Angry Birds, a full 45% of power consumption was for user tracking, including using GPS to presumably geotarget your ads. Of course, GPS isn’t actually useful for the game itself. You can read the full report in PDF form if you want more details.  To be honest, this information just sounds like a ploy to divert companies from offering their ads for free and monetizing them through other means.

[Source]

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This holiday season, there’s quite a few ways to save some money outfitting your smartphone, including getting both discounted and just some free apps.  Today, Gameloft is revealing its very enticing end-of-the-year sale: $0.99 for every download of apps and games. Their Twitter message goes like this:

Follow us to find out when you can grab ALL of our games, including Modern Combat 3, for $0.99 on the #AndroidMarket!

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You’d think that getting that kind of front page billing would be very beneficial for developers. They get their name out there and they get in front of the eyeballs of thousands of people that may not have otherwise found their app. Unfortunately, things aren’t always quite as peachy-keen as these devs had hoped.

You see, the way that you can get your Android app featured on the front page of the Amazon Appstore is to agree to be the “Free App of the Day.” The idea is you get the promotion, build up the user base, and gain more sales down the line as a result. However, there is a stipulation in there that goes contrary to earlier assumptions.

Amazon sets the price of the apps sold in the Appstore, giving a 70% cut back to the developer. However, the developer can set a “list price” and be guaranteed to receive at least 20% of that. If you get promoted as the “Free App of the Day,” though, you waive that right. You earn nothing. And that’s what happened to Shifty Jelly, developer of Pocket Casts.

It got promoted as the Free App of the Day one day and got over 100,000 downloads. That resulted in zero dollars, of course. The day after the free promotion saw only 20 sales, then 14, then just one or two. In effect, Shifty Jelly lost money, because it then had to deal with up to 300 e-mails a day from the new 100,000+ users asking for support, plus all the additional server hardware to handle the new load. Free apps are a tough business, and many developers for iPhone experience the same thing with iOS related “free app sites.”

It has also decided to sever its relationship with the Amazon store, and recently tweeted that it had now been told the app can’t be removed unless it was also taken down from the Google Marketplace, though we’ve not been able to confirm that with Amazon.

The take home lesson is similar to that of trying to promote your business, company, or app through Amazon: know what you’re getting into and recognize that it could backfire.

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The “free” section on Android Market only takes you so far. There are plenty of gems out there that aren’t necessarily listed through that marketplace. If you want free apps on your Droid or iPhone, you now have another choice, AppAggie.

It’s not really a conventional app store, per se, because AppAggie is better described as a “free apps aggregator.” It looks for free apps around the web and gives you an opportunity to download them. For now, there is support for both iOS and Android, but it’s unclear if they’re going to expand to other platforms too.

The biggest difference is that every app in AppAggie is free. There’s likely some in-app advertisements, micro-transactions, or some other form of monetization, but the app itself is free. The apps are reasonably varied, ranging from social networking to weather, including a bunch of games. Remember that AppAggie isn’t providing the apps themselves; the links simply redirect you to the original source, be it iTunes, Android Market, or whatever else.

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