The first app to generate personalized recommendations for saving power

Jun 15, 2012 09:06 GMT  ·  By

Adam Oliner, a guy with a Stanford CS Ph.D with degrees in math, CS, and EE from MIT, has come up with a brilliant solution to optimize power drainage on iDevices.

It’s an app called Carat which crowd-sources information regarding the apps that use the most power and recommends actions to avoid wasting energy.

It’s not the type of solution that recommends dimming your screen, or killing all apps in your multi-tasking tray either. Instead, it tells you which specific apps to kill and even offers an estimate on the battery life you’ll gain afterwards. Pretty neat, huh?

“Carat is the first app to generate personalized recommendations for improving your battery life,” according to AMP Lab, the studio behind the application led by Oliner.

The app’s description, however, might scare some users who are a bit cautious about the type of data they allow their handsets to send off to the cloud.

“Ever wondered why your battery is draining so quickly? Just install Carat, open it every few days so it can send data to our servers, and within a week Carat will start recommending Actions (just for you!) and even predicting the improvements you will see,” says AMP Lab.

“Although Carat cannot measure energy use directly, it infers what apps are responsible using advanced machine learning methods,” according to the developers.

The company explains that Carat takes these measurements and sends them to the backend servers only occasionally. The data is processed using “cutting-edge algorithms” to determine what needs to be done to stop wasting.

However, the development studio assures users that any data being collected by Carat cannot be traced back to them. Not that they’d even think of using it for such purposes (emphasis ours):

“By collecting snippets of non-personal data from a large number of devices, Carat does not need to run continuously in the background. Nothing we collect identifies you, personally,” reads the description.

Best of all. The app is completely free to download and use.

Download Carat iOS (Free)