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

For most of us, battery life is the number one problem on Android. In fact, if battery life isn’t your number one problem, then I’m genuinely curious to learn what is.

A new app called Hush promises to save your battery life in a scientifically-backed way. This isn’t some random app created by a shoddy development team that really just wants ad clicks: this is a legitimate app created by researchers at Purdue University.

Hush is a free tool that prevents power-hungry apps from checking for updates in the background. Best of all, it only targets apps that you don’t use regularly.

Researchers came up for the idea for the app after finding that Android apps account for 45.9% of all battery usage, with 29% of that usage taking place while your phone’s display is turned off.

In other words, your smartphone is draining a lot of battery life when it’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 themselves throughout the day. This ensures they’re up-to-date and ready-to-use at all times.

Unfortunately, these updates occur without your knowledge or explicit permission. They can occur when your handset is locked, for example.

After installing Hush, you can reduce the battery usage taking place while your phone is asleep from 29% to just 16%. In other words, instead of having 29% of your phone’s app usage taking place while the screen is off, you’ll get just 16%.

Hush works by optimizing apps. As team researcher Prof Charlie Hu explains:

“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 application programming interfaces called wakelocks.”

By fixing lazy designs and other optimization problems, Hush can save hours of battery life on your average day: during testing, phones running Hush lasted about 15% longer than phones without it.

Ultimately, researchers want to “double the battery life” for smartphones.

How to Download Hush

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