Frustrated with your smartphone’s battery life? A new iOs and Android app called “Carat” has been released to give you free personalized battery life-saving recommendations…but it’s also an app developers worst enemy.

Carat takes measurements from your phone and sends tips on how to update your device, such as “Kill Pandora- Expected Battery Life Improvement: 1 Hour 50 minutes”.

While Carat might help your battery life, it will kill the reputation of many beloved apps. Those that fall under the most common “apps to kill” need to revisit their mobile app testing and work to lower the energy used to run the application. More on that in a second.

As reported by Josh Constine of TechCrunch, here are some things Carat has discovered:

• In an initial test with just 100 users, it found 35 apps with energy bugs…
• Carat has since found thousands of instances of these energy bugs on devices in the wild
• Skype, Yelp, and Pandora are some of the most popular energy hogs. They’re not necessarily inefficient, they just require more power than most apps and might be the best to temporarily kill off.

For developers, these energy issues (in fact, most bugs) should be detected in the development phase, not after launch on a user’s Carat app. How? Through in-the-wild testing of course.

In-the-wild testing is designed to cover the fringe use-cases that lab testing cannot possibly cover. These would be things like how an app performs on Wi-Fi vs. 4G; how it functions on different carrierrs and in different locations – all of which contribute to an app’s overall performance.

For more info, check out inthewildtesting.com >>>