If you’re struggling to hit the end of the day without looking for a charger, it may be time to rethink some of the apps on your smartphone. Thankfully, cloud storage company pCloud has made it incredibly easy to pinpoint the biggest culprits for battery drain, as it has released a comprehensive breakdown of the most sophisticated apps.
These apps are probably consuming most of the resources from your phone, which means that they are likely to be responsible for the slow performance and huge amounts of storage space that you have to use. In other words, if your phone starts dragging its feet or you have to carry around an external battery all the time, these should be the first apps to get to know their maker.
First up is the Fitbit app.
That makes a certain amount of sense. Depending on the Fitbit model you have, the app on your smartphone may be responsible for collecting location data so that you can see the exact route of your walk or run on a map. Additionally, Fitbit keeps the app up to date with the latest stats from friends and family members’ trackers, especially when you compete against them in fitness competitions.
While it can be handy to always have the numbers about your sleep patterns, resting heart rate, step count, and more, it can be worth limiting some of the app’s features to reduce battery life.
Also among the top five worst offenders are Skype, Uber and Facebook. The latter is almost always included in one of those summaries of the worst battery life drainers, so this is hardly surprising. However, Uber isn’t an app that we singled out earlier. However, when the application is open – it monitors your location at all times and allows you to communicate with the driver or share your ETA with friends – it’s noteworthy that Uber is so sophisticated when the app is in the background on your homepage too .
In summary, the pCloud team states: “Overall, social media apps make up six of the 20 most demanding apps on your phone battery. On average, 11 additional functions can be carried out in the background on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, WhatsApp and Linkedin, e.g. B. Photos, WiFi, locations and the microphone. All of these require more power and ultimately more from your phone and its battery.
“Our study found that online dating drains your phone battery as much as your emotions. Online dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Grinder make up 15% of the top killer apps, so an average of 11 functions can run in the background. All three dating apps do not have a dark mode and therefore require more power when used. This will discharge the battery faster. “
And when it comes to storage, pCloud’s study found that travel apps should be the first to go to the (digital) trash.
United Airlines ranked the top 30 apps using memory on your phone, taking up 437.8MB of free space, while Lyft and Uber took up 325.1MB and 299.6MB, respectively. Take-away apps have also been notorious for taking up free space on your handset – probably because these apps cache glossy, high-resolution images of the menu and restaurant so you can spend less time loading when you’re starved.
That’s all well and good when you’re drooling and ready to order, but in the cold daylight, this is storage that you’d almost certainly prefer to use to store music, listen offline, or snap a camera snapshot.
“If you want to try out several grocery apps, you have to delete them and download them again if necessary,” advises pCloud.
“Overall, the study clearly shows that social media apps are still one of the biggest phone killers when it comes to draining the battery. However, it is also highlighted that apps like fitness or travel, which require multiple applications to run in the background, place even higher demands on our phone’s battery and storage systems. “
