We all know that excited feeling when you take your new Android phone out of the box for the first time. The possibilities seem infinite – the battery will last forever, your phone will operate at lightning speed and you’ve never had more space for all your photos and music. But, how long until that hopeful feeling fades? Well, just wait until you’ve installed all your favourite apps. You may see your smartphone or tablet slow down to a virtual crawl in no time at all…
The infographic below and accompanying report from MEF member, AVG Technologies – the AVG Android App Report (Q2 2015) – identifies the top 10 apps that drain your battery, clog your storage and use up most of your mobile data Also, see below for additional insights from performance expert, Sandro Villinger.
What are the top app sinners?
- Snapchat! Oh Snap! Forget Facebook, Spotify, or any of the preinstalled apps: In Q2 2015, Snapchat dethroned them all as the app which had the highest, overall performance drain. Did you know that while it runs, it makes use of the camera, Wi-Fi/mobile data and GPS functionality, simultaneously? This explains the high battery life and traffic consumption.
- Samsung Updates! The top, hidden battery-drainer this quarter was a service innocuously named “com.sec.android.fwupgrade,” which is responsible for delivering periodic Samsung updates to your device via Wi-Fi. As with the similarly update-heavy Samsung Security Policy Update (KNOX) and Google Play apps, the service has a massive impact on the battery life of your device.
- Your Browser’s a True Hoarder! Joining more obvious entrants on the top ten list this quarter, such as Spotify and Amazon Kindle, Google Chrome emerged as the second highest, storage-consuming app, thanks to its collection of your browsing data over time. Our advice here: Clean up your browser from the settings menu or use a thorough cleaner product.
- Facebook ’mis’-manages: A consistent ‘top’ performer in our charts, Facebook entered a new contender this quarter, with its monitoring app,Facebook Pages Manager. The app stores a lot of local content as it tracks page statistics, followers and comments while on the move
- A bad forecast: Both The Weather Channel and Words with Friends were surprise entrants in our start-up chart – with the apps seemingly having no clear need to run invisibly in the background
- A drain on your wallet and smartphone: With two of its shopping apps in our top ten ‘run by user’ list, if you want to save data and battery life on the go, you might want to steer clear of Amazon.
This blog post first appeared on AVG’s blog and is reproduced here with permission.
