There are few things more frustrating than running out of battery life half way through your day. When your phone flashes that battery warning sign, there’s pretty much nothing you can do other than to charge your phone. But, why does your phone run out of juice so often? Chances are that there’s an app or two that’s consistently draining your phone. Which app? You can try and guess, but it’s really hard to find out which apps are battery draining and which ones are safe to run.

A new app (ironically), called Carat might help. This app will tell you which apps on your phone run in the background, use up too much battery life, and generally kill your phone. With Carat (iOS and Android), you can locate those badly behaving apps and selectively shut them down (or, as Carat states: “kill them”). Here’s how Carat works.

Downloading and Installing the Carat App

First, I’ll point out that Carat is free. Secondly, when tested, this app downloaded without any issues. When you first open up the Carat app, you will see a small consent screen. In order to track app usage, Carat must have access to basic information about your phone including you phone OS and model; the apps that you currently have running; how much battery life is remaining; and other details. Carat promises not to store your personal information, so you don’t have to worry about hacking problems. Once you’ve agreed to this consent form, Carat will ask to use your current location.

The Carat home screen listed under “My Device” includes some basic information and a “J Score.” The J Score will let you see what percentile battery life you have in comparison to other users. You can then view the “running apps” section of the My Device screen and see which apps are currently running on your phone. While Carat seems promising, I had a few problems when using this app.

Carat Takes Time to Launch

The idea behind Carat is a great one. Only, Carat needs a few days to generate a complete report, so if you’re thinking that you will be able to save your phone from battery doom right away, you’re out of luck. There are some intriguing parts of the Carat app including the “Bug Report” and the “Hog Report,” but I couldn’t test these for accuracy, since Carat isn’t able to grab phone data right away.

After a few days of collecting data, Carat will gather this information and present you with the details. I’m guessing that most people will be able to save some decent battery life and get rid of power sucking apps, but I’ll have to wait and see how the app performs on my own iPhone. If Carat does work well, this will be a very handy app to have on your side. All too often, apps take more battery life than you bargained for and you’re left with a dead phone. Does Carat take up a lot of phone space? The app developers claim that this app doesn’t suck battery life. Then again, there’s no real way to test Carat without using another program like Carat and the whole thing begins again. Really though, you should give Carat a try (even though you’ll have to wait a few days) if your phone is consistently running out of battery life mid-day.