I'm going to take this opportunity to complain about Google Navigation app, on every device I've owned.<p>Their directions really should say "ETA: 3 Hours from now. ETToBatteryDrained: 1.5 hours from now. Shoulda remembered your car charger, dumbass". 'Cause I do forget to pack it every goddamned time.<p>I don't know if this is really possible, but they really should have a "low-accuracy" mode, where if you're on a freeway with no turns for an hour, they should turn off the GPS, and just use inertial or cell-phone navigation mostly. Then only periodically check the GPS. If you are going to turn soon, or appear to have deviated, they can go back into active GPS mode, but the goal is to avoid wasting battery when you're probably just following the road.
One of my friends does research on this for another of the big carriers, and has told me some war stories.<p>* No one caches, or they cache really badly. They've seen 20-30% reductions in battery usage from implementing a caching scheme from one version to the next. His theory is that they're coming from the web world, where caching is baked in.<p>* One app killed the battery by waking up the radios every 2 minutes to check for updated scores, sending a few bytes each time. Network traffic, in aggregate, was very small, but it just killed the batteries.
I think they made at least one error: Need for Speed: Most Wanted was not developed by Rovio.<p>Also of interest is that none of the streaming radio services suffered in their rather proprietary ranking: <a href="http://support.verizonwireless.com/information/app_ranking/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://support.verizonwireless.com/information/app_ranking/i...</a>
The actual list: <a href="http://support.verizonwireless.com/information/app_ranking/high_risk.html" rel="nofollow">http://support.verizonwireless.com/information/app_ranking/h...</a><p>It is interesting to note that 100% of the apps listed are games with wakelocks. While some may argue that this is necessary for games, I counter that your game should pause after a period of inactivity and allow the device to sleep. Just because your app is a console port does not mean it is running on a console.<p>Kudos to Verizon for naming and shaming.
Impose Draconian data caps and try to con your users into leaving their unlimited data plans. Then, call apps out for using too much data.<p>Thanks, Verizon.