Report: Top 5 Apps That Drain Your Android Phone's Battery

Handout from Avast

No matter which social, music or cloud storage platforms are your most used, one thing they may share is their ability to sap the life out of your Android phone. Avast, the global leader in digital security products, has released its quarterly Avast Android App Performance & Trend Report Q1 2017 to help you navigate the choppy digital sea in order to find out which apps are draining your much-loved mobile.

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Top 10 performance-draining apps that run at start-up (Avast Android App Performance & Trend Report Q1 2017) (Photo: Business Wire)

Following detailed research, the report identifies the following 20 apps which have been deemed as the 'greediest' after combining their impact on battery life, storage capacity and data plan usage. With information from over 3,000,000 Android users, it charts the worst offenders and the new arrivals on the lists, including a trio of newcomers from Google in the form of its Play Music, Talkback and Docs apps. Seasoned pros Facebook, Instagram and Amazon kindle grace the charts once more for eating up storage.

A number of new apps have entered the charts for the first time this quarter, including:

• Google Talkback: As the highest new entry in apps that run at start-up, Talkback gets toggled on by a number of third-party apps, meaning it can remain on even after you reboot your device
• Google Play Music: Ad blockers appear to be a cause of this music app's draining performance
• SHAREit: Designed to share files over Wi-Fi from one device to another, this popular Lenovo app is reliant on Wi-Fi, making it the fourth highest performance-draining app run by users
• Google Docs: This simple text editor app is the second highest draining app run by users on Android devices, draining them most when directly connected to Google Drive via 3G and Wi-Fi
• Samsung Media Hub: Although discontinued in 2014, this app's ranking is mainly down to older Samsung devices having it pre-installed. Users should remove and replace it with the newest version available to them
• Piano Tiles 2: Tests run on a Samsung Galaxy S6 revealed that the app managed to drain the entire battery in less than 3½ hours of consistent usage

Notable mentions go to Google's own apps. A total of eight apps feature in the top 10 lists of both start-up and user-run apps. Samsung also has a starring role with seven of its apps cropping up in the tables. The fact that both Google and Samsung's offerings are often pre-installed on the majority of Android devices may play a part in this. When it comes to instant messengers, the discontinued ChatON, Google Hangouts and LINE: Free Calls & Messaging are the troublesome trio finding fame in the top 10 lists.

This quarter's 'Most Improved' accolade is shared between picture messenger tool Snapchat, social media giant Facebook and music streaming behemoth Spotify. Having previously occupied three of the four top spots for performance-draining apps run by users and on start-up, these companies have made a concerted effort this quarter to improve. musical.ly also deserves a mention for escaping the heavy-hitters for storage as it no longer appears in any of the lists.

"Industry stats show smartphone sales grew 9.1 percent in the first quarter of this year* and Android devices continue to dominate market share. Affordable smartphones, however, can compromise on features like device storage so the experience of the user is increasingly important and how apps affect a phone's performance is critical," said Gagan Singh, SVP and GM Mobile Business, Avast. "For many of us, our smartphones are the main device in our everyday lives. Knowing which of our favorite apps are the hardest-hitting on battery life, data usage, and storage is important so we can manage any that we are regularly using on our phones."

An all-in-one device cleaner and optimizer like AVG Cleaner TM for Android TM, an Avast product, can help manage the top mobile resource-hogging apps on your devices. The full report can be downloaded here.

Methodology

The Avast Android App Performance & Trend Report was gathered from a sample of aggregated and anonymized data from more than 3 million Android users around the globe. The app data included in this report covers a time period of January 2017 through March 2017 and only includes Google Play applications which Avast observed a minimum sample size of 50,000 usage incidents.

* Figures referenced fromGartner's May 2017 report on worldwide smartphone sales

ABOUT Avast:

Avast ( www.avast.com ), the global leader in digital security products, protects over 400 million people online. Avast offers products under the Avast and AVG brands that protect people from threats on the internet and the evolving IoT threat landscape. The company's threat detection network is among the most advanced in the world, using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to detect and stop threats in real time. Avast digital security products for Mobile, PC or Mac are top-ranked and certified by VB100, AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, OPSWAT, ICSA Labs, West Coast Labs and others. Avast is backed by leading global private equity firms CVC Capital Partners and Summit Partners.