Avast detailed the top battery-draining Android applications and other apps designed for Google’s operating system which are extremely resource-intensive as part of its latest Android App Performance & Trend Report covering the first quarter of 2017. The company divided the most battery-unfriendly apps it identified into two categories – the ones that run at startup and those that don’t. The former segment was led by Samsung AllShare, Samsung Security Policy Updates, and Beaming Service for Samsung, with the Korean company’s ChatON service placing fourth and being followed by Google Maps, WhatsApp, Facebook, and WeChat. AppLock and DU Battery Saver are another two popular Android apps which will boot alongside your system and significantly degrade the battery life of your device, Avast said. On the other side of the spectrum are apps that won’t launch by themselves but will still drain your battery to a noticeable degree, with this category having Samsung WatchON, Samsung’s Video Editor, and Netflix in the top three, in that order. Spotify, Snapchat, and Clean Master are only slightly less battery-intensive, with other culprits in this category being LINE, Microsoft Outlook, and even BBC News.
If you often find yourself low on internal storage, social media apps are the first ones you should blame, the report suggests, pointing to Facebook and Instagram as the two largest Android storage eaters that run at startup, adding that they’re followed by Amazon Kindle, Facebook Messenger, and CosmoSia. In regards to apps that you’ll have to launch yourself before likely having your internal flash memory eaten, Spotify, Snapchat, LINE, Samsung’s Video Editor, and SoundCloud are the apps to look out for, Avast claims. Facebook and Instagram were also found to be the biggest spenders of mobile data as far as apps that can launch themselves are concerned, with Netflix, Spotify, and Snapchat being on the top of a similar list meant for data-eating apps started by users. Mobile gamers should look out for Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga, Piano Tiles 2, and Clash of Clans, all of which will significantly degrade the performance of their smartphones, the report suggests, while also mentioning My Talking Tom, Subway Surfers, Hill Climb Racing, and Clash Royale in the same context.
In the general performance-draining category which covers all resource-intensive aspects of apps that run as soon as the user boots their Android device, Samsung AllShare proved to be the greediest of the lot, with Samsung’s ChatON and Push Service making the rest of the top three. Those were followed by a variety of Google-made offerings in the form of TalkBack, Google Play Music, Google Maps, Google Play Newsstand, and Google+, in that order. Google Hangouts was proven to be the tenth most performance-degrading Android app, right behind Samsung’s ChatON service, Avast said. In regards to greedy apps that have to be launched by users, Samsung WatchON, Google Docs, and Samsung Media Hub were found to be the largest culprits for degraded performance, followed by SHAREit, Samsung‘s Video Editor, and Flipboard. Google Text-To-Speech, Clean Master, LINE, and Adobe Acrobat Reader made up the rest of the top ten list of Android apps that users would be better off not starting if they want to preserve the performance of their devices at all costs.
Avast’s findings were based on a vast volume of data collected from more than three million Android users in a three-month period ending March 31st. While the cybersecurity company had data on even more apps at hand, it opted to exclude info on apps with less than 50,000 usage incidences over the observed period, consequently preventing (often extremely buggy) Android software which isn’t popular from affecting its results. It bears to mention that Avast’s findings aren’t meant to single out the most inefficient apps available on contemporary Android devices but those that have historically drained the largest amount of resources over the first quarter of the year. While that isn’t to say e.g. Facebook is a particularly efficient mobile app, the fact that it tops several categories in Avast’s report is more of a testament to how popular it is than the ultimate proof that it’s a poorly coded app, and the same goes for all of the other names that made an appearance in Avast’s latest Android app performance report.