When it comes to smartphones, one of our constant fears is running out of battery life too quickly…it is okay as long as it makes it through the day and to my nightstand to charge overnight, but having my ‘lifeline’ die prematurely is simply unacceptable. The display, especially these new QHD displays can be killers on you battery, and so can phone’s radio or system resources, but the number on killer on our batteries are Apps. Right now on my device I am showing the Screen took 15-percent of my battery, the Phone Radio is at 6-percent, Wi-Fi at 1-percent and App Usage is 76-percent! Now the Android OS is 20-percent and Android Systems is at 19-percent, but the rest of that 76-percent are other applications running in the background. It is important to know which Apps are taking their toll on your battery, data or storage resources and that is exactly what the latest AVG study tries to identify for us. The annual survey is from the latest Q1 2015 results.
On one hand, we have the greatest selection of Apps available for us to use on our Android devices, but the more an App can do, the more likely it is draining our battery, using up our data and taking up storage in our memory. They are constantly checking for content and feed updates, checking for email, pushing through notifications, streaming audio, picking up and delivering hi-res graphics or downloading data of some sort and many run in the background all day long.
The three main problems encountered are Battery Drain, Storage Consumption and Data Usage and this is what the survey looks at and ranks the Apps accordingly. Another thing they look at is how is the App started – does it turn-on every time you turn on your device, does it run all the time in an ‘auto-run’ kind of way, or does the device user have to start it themselves. The top-ten Apps are listed under how they work on your device and how they get started in the first place. We will go through and point out some highlights for you, but the details are in the gallery below if you want to see them all.
The top findings in this report are that Chat Apps are still the greediest of all and some of the ones we use the most. The top-ten greedy Apps under the Autorun category are: Facebook, BBM, 8 Ball Pool, Instagram, Messenger, WeChat, Facebook Pages Manager, ooVoo Video Call Text and Voice, KakaoTalk: Free Calls and Text, and the tenth on is Vine.
The top-ten greedy Apps that the user starts up are: Spotify Music, Amazon Kindle, LINE: Free Calls and Messages, Samsung WatchON, Snapchat, Netflix, SoundCloud – Music and Audio, Clean Master (Speed Booster), Tumblr, and PicsArt Photo Studio.
Facebook keeps the top spot as the App that drains the phone’s resources, but the surprise App is the 2D game, 8 Ball Pool…why is it a startup App and why does it need to constantly be running in the background? Spotify allows 3,333 songs to be stored locally which can really eat up the storage not to mention the data use of music and videos associated with the App. We can help with our system resources by only running the apps that we really need and use on a daily basis.
Tony Anscombe, Senior Security Evangelist, AVG Technologies says, “Many of us take every day practical apps like weather and chat for granted and despite spending little time on them, the impact on our devices is actually quite significant. A number of unexpected apps such as these are consuming battery, storage, and data traffic without users knowledge – and, in many cases, for no good reason. So if you’re wondering why you’re not getting the best performance out of your device, this could well be why.”
Take a look at the gallery below to view the top-ten Apps that may be draining your system’s resources, they are all top-ten lists and are broken down by different categories.
