Whether or not you are a Facebook addict, the use of the app on your smartphone can be expensive. According to online security company AVG Technologies, social media apps like Facebook have the highest battery drainage, followed by games and shopping apps.
AVG’s data comes via its own app, currently installed on over 1 million Android devices. It measures how installed apps wear out smartphone performance and results are gathered and presented every quarter.
And not because those consumers are always updating their status, sharing images or waiting for the latest viral video. Different apps put a strain on a smartphone in different ways and, Facebook tops the list, all thanks to the app which is always running in the background monitoring activity on the network and sending notifications, which causes the biggest overall drain.
Facebook was ranked top of the list in the last quarter too. Games can have a huge impact on a smartphone or tablet’s free storage space and at the moment the titles that take up the most space are Boom Beach and Deer Hunter 2014. Games like Puzzles & Dragons and Farmville have suffered a 50 per cent and 43 per cent decline respectively in installed user base in Q4 when compared to the beginning of the year.
Spotify the music streaming app has climbed to second position. Out of our total user base, 638,716 users included in its study and its impact on a handset’s storage capacity and data consumption has pushed it into second.
Samsung’s Update service, named Samsung KNOX, is another battery hogger which is a new entrant in the list a number of users and even journalists have publicly complained about not just the amount of notifications shown but also a 30-40 per cent drop in battery life. Also, Samsung’s Beaming and Security Updates services appear as the two worst run-at-startup apps, while Samsung’s WatchOn remote app was the most energy consuming app run by users.
However, despite growing popularity, one app sliding down the charts is Netflix. Thanks to a November update the app is no longer in the top three for battery drain.
Amazon’s main shopping app is now in the top five for overall device performance drain and AVG notes that the app saw increasing use as consumers shopped for Thanksgiving and for Christmas.
There are a host of apps for Android that promise to keep unruly apps in check and to keep a device performing at optimum level but AVG’s results show that some, such as Clean Master, actually put more strain on battery, speed, available storage capacity and on data.
“What surprised us was that some of those tools and security updates aimed at improving your phone experience, were in fact impacting it quite heavily. So we hope our report will encourage people to understand how to manage their apps to prevent them impacting negatively on their favorite mobile past-times,” said AVG Technologies CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak.
