You love all those apps, but they take eons to load, right? Tingxin Yan and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are developing a software that can speed things and launch apps faster. What it does is to predict the future and get your app ready before you even need it.

The software learns about user behavior in order to make those predictions. For instance, if the first thing you do every morning is to check Facebook, your phone learns that so it can have the software preloaded it to open faster.

It’s called predictive caching; it involves guessing which software routines are most likely to be needed for the next stage of a computerized process – so that the right app is primed to run when called on, without booting from scratch, explained New Scientist. The system uses the phone’s location and motion sensors to learn when the user typically runs an app.

In tests using Windows Phone, it cut 6 seconds from the average 20-second boot-up time for apps. But it easily consumed 2 per cent of the battery per day while doing so. Great things come for a price.

Yan is presenting the concept at the MobiSys conference this week in the UK. Hope it comes our way soon.