There’s a real point to this post and it’s because I’ve personally experienced frustrations with my smartphone – or rather, smartphone battery. Like most of you, I need my smartphone battery to last at least more than half a day.
And it does, if I don’t touch it.
One of the most obvious, battery-sucking applications on my smartphone (I’m not sure about anybody else) is Waze. So unless if I know my way around to get to an event or a meeting, I’ve no choice but to sacrifice my smartphone’s fully-charged, “in the green”, 98% battery life.
It’s the sole reason why I cart around 2 power banks with me wherever I go and am perpetually sticking my smartphone in my car charger, effectively draining my car’s battery as I go along.
Like I said, it’s frustrating.
So I decided to dig up a list of apps to find out which ones were the most resource-consuming – battery, first and foremost, but I managed to stumble upon data and storage as well!
Are you ready to find out? They are as follows:
Performance
According to AVG’s latest quarterly Android App Performance Report*, in terms of “Overall Performance Impact” on your phone, the top (or worst) 5 were as follows:
But this doesn’t mean that the above apps in themselves are the problem. It could be due to the amount of time that we’re spending on them. I mean, do we more often than not spend way too much time on Facebook on a daily basis?
Think about it.
Data
Unless if for some miraculous reason you’ve got permanent WiFi coverage tailing right behind you wherever you go, you’ve probably got a data cap to be cautious about. Here are the 5 worst apps for data usage:
- Daily Mail Online
- Tumblr
- Spotify
I’ll be honest that even I end up having to purchase extra GBs of data halfway into the month. I’m on Celcom so that’s extra RM50 for 5GB of additional volume.
If you keep going over your data allowance, maybe you should be using less of the above apps that secretly suck the life out of your data cap! Alternatively, fire up those apps only when you’re on WiFi.
Battery
And last but not least, the dreadful battery drain apps. Samsung owners, brace yourselves for a shock, because the Beaming Service and Security Policy Updates apps – service that run in the background on Samsung phones – are the 2 biggest battery drains on your devices.
- Beaming Service for Beep ‘n Go
- Security Policy Updates
- Facebook (according to MacWorld, this applies to iPhones too)
- Waze Social GPS Maps & Traffic
- Vault-Hide SMS Pics & Videos
Waze! I knew it! So the lessons to be learned from this report? Root your Samsung phone to get rid of its bloatware and perhaps really watch your Facebook habit.
Sorry, that status update can wait, I guess?
BONUS: How to check which iPhone apps are murdering your battery in cold blood? For those on iOS 8 and above, the first step is to go to your Settings app, then into the General tab, then into Usage, and then continue into Battery Usage. A quick scroll down will show you which apps are using the most battery life.
Thank me later 🙂
*AVG’s Android App Performance Report studied one million of its users to see which apps were the most resource-consuming (data, battery and storage) on their devices.
Sources: AndroidPit, MacWorld.
