DIGITAL LIFE

The apps that drain your phone's battery the most

We all know it - in the first months, the mobile phone lasted several days without charging, but now? A person does not even leave the house without a charger or power bank. He accidentally forgets them, leaves GPS, Bluetooth on, is on the phone longer than usual and doesn't even know it, and the battery is dead. The phone simply turns off, from fatigue. And it doesn't even have to be that old. The topic was covered by pCloud.

An ordinary person probably doesn't think much about it. Gloomily, he adds that he could have made a better investment instead of an expensive smartphone, which he has to charge forever anyway and somehow get through it. Or he is just impatiently waiting for the hopeful return of replaceable batteries, new revolutionary types of batteries, or charging methods.

But let's take a look at why this is happening. Explain at least some factors.

What affects battery life?...Decreased battery life can have several causes. One of the basics is charging - keeping the battery at the golden mean between approx. 25-85%. I guess everyone already knows the rule "never discharge, but never overcharge" aka "carefully discharge and even more carefully charge".

It is the same with weather conditions, for example. Very high temperatures, but also very low ones, are not good for any electronics. In general, any temperature fluctuations are not a win. For a better feeling, we recommend avoiding black surfaces, direct sunlight (especially in the summer and during a higher mobile load or while charging), leaving the smartphone outside in the cold, etc.

Another of the phenomena of batteries, endurance and charging is the so-called fast charging, which is still debated whether to consider it harmful at all. Despite the slight damage to battery performance, original chargers are still the best option on the way to stable battery life for your phone.

One of them is, for example, applications. You don't even have to use them regularly. While you have them downloaded, they exist in your mobile, living their (peaceful) life. But this peaceful life still comes at a cost – increased demands on the battery.

The world's 100 most used apps and battery...People from cloud storage company pCloud analyzed the 100 most popular apps. While social network applications have been clear adepts at reducing smartphone battery life since the beginning, there were also applications that no one would say so about.

In the analysis, pCloud mainly focused on what functions the application uses. Position, camera, microphone? They then assigned a potential battery drain value to each feature, and continued with each subsequent app. The company, on the other hand, has also been eyeing battery-saving features such as dark mode. It was based on the evaluation of these metrics that pCloud indicated which applications would likely drain even the devices with the best battery life.

Fitbit (un)expectedly took first place. The fitness app used 14 of the 16 available background functions, including the four most demanding ones—camera, location, microphone, and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The second place was immediately occupied by Verizon, the application using online banking surpassed even Facebook, Skype or Uber in terms of battery consumption.

However, what certainly does not surprise anyone is that applications such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat and Tinder found themselves in the top twenty. Now also called "the most demanding applications." Social networks often use too many phone functions. In addition, these applications "force" a person to spend much more time in their environment than he would spend in the so-called news applications. However, not all major social networking apps, such as Twitter, made the list.

Another analysis, the problem of estimation and RAM... but pCloud did not stop at this relatively simple analysis and is currently considering the inclusion of the potential use of applications. It is not exactly an easy task to adequately compare all aspects of how applications affect the battery. Despite the fact that people are the creators of these devices, we do not know them nearly as perfectly as we should, or they wanted And since these apps are functionally different, it's hard to compare them objectively. After all, even a layman perceives radical differences between applications such as the Slovak George from SLSP and the world-famous Netflix. From the point of view of use, this is a matter of course, but today's laymen can already see more deeply hidden things such as the aforementioned functions, more complicated settings, the connection with the home environment of the device and what risks it brings.

For laymen who do not know all the technical terms, mere mortals, pCloud has also prepared a breakdown of the first 50 battery-killing applications, with simple, easy-to-understand graphics. In addition to the mentioned social networks, there were also McDonald's, Reddit, Netflix and, as usual, TikTok or Duolingo (thanks to their daily notifications).

In addition to looking at battery life, pCloud also looked at the internal memory usage of the apps surveyed and found that the travel apps took up the most RAM on the phone. They were basically comparing the size of apps. First place was taken by United Airlines, which uses more than 400 MB of memory, followed by the lesser-known Lyft and Uber. Delivery applications such as Bolt, Wolt or Bistro, which are fundamentally very similar to other navigation and travel applications, have also fared similarly.

But what is the ultimate solution? Bigger battery?...So what are the options? Fast charging is not the ideal way. Delete applications probably not either. Well, what you can influence is their usage and settings with all the permissions you give them. You won't influence much with it, but even that little bit can help.

by Katarina Meciarova