Which Android Apps Consume the Most Power?

Are you annoyed by the fact that you have to charge your phone twice a day? Are you considering replacing your faithful device with one that is more energy efficient? I think you should wait with such a radical decision – it may be the apps you run, and not your phone’s battery, to blame. New research done by AVG has identified the top apps that drain our Android smartphones’ resources and battery the most, Cnet reports.

Among the top performance draining apps we can find several that are installed on almost every smartphone. Facebook is the best example: the social network is not just eating up loads of our time, but also draining most of our devices’ performance, battery and storage space. But before you start pointing fingers on the big blue social giant, know that King.com, the software developer behind some very popular titles in the Saga series, is responsible for four of the top 10 performance draining apps on our Android phones.

AVG has taken a look on the habits and the apps of over 1 million AVG Android app users in the third quarter of last year to find out which are the apps that drain most of the power and consume the most resources on our smartphones and tablets without us even knowing. They only considered apps that had over 1 million downloads from the Google Play Store. Their findings will make you think: besides the King.com apps in the top 10, they found three of Samsung’s pre-installed apps that run on startup to be the ones responsible for the most energy drained. When taking a look at which apps eat up the most storage space, they found the New York Times – Breaking News, the Tango Messenger and Spotify to be the hungriest. They also measured which games drain our batteries faster – considering we spend much time playing, especially on our tablets – and found that titles like Puzzle & Dragons, Hay Day and Candy Crush Saga are the most power-hungry of them. The full list, as well as more details about their findings can be found here.

Hopefully Project Volta in Android 5.0 Lollipop will change this in the better.