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IT’S A PROBLEM all smartphone owners experience sooner or later. You use your phone normally and then before you know it, you’re stuck with only a few minutes of battery life remaining and there’s no charger in sight.
Most of that is down to the type of apps you’re using, and more specifically, the ones that are running in the background.
For Android users, security firm AVG have put together a report which highlights the biggest culprits. It’s probably unsurprising that Facebook is the top of the list for overall impact on both battery, traffic and storage, but the two biggest drains at startup are both bloatware apps from Samsung – Beaming Service and Security Policy Updates.
As for games, King’s Candy Crush series has four games in the top five, with only Supercell’s Clash of Clans taking fourth spot. The reason is likely due to their freemium nature, using location for ads and using numerous resources to deliver new features.
While the most resource-heavy apps happened to be social apps with Facebook grabbing top spot. Spotify, Instagram and Amazon Appstore were also identified as major apps that will use up much of your phone’s resources.
And for good measure, the apps that take up the most storage on your phone by temporarily collecting data that it doesn’t delete or by adding more features to the service via updates. Tango Messenger was seen as the biggest offender while the Daily Mail and Facebook followed suit.
So what can you do to rectify this? The obvious one is to not use these apps, although if you find them useful, then you’re probably going to continue using them. AVG recommends turning off features like WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS when they’re not in use so they don’t eat into your battery life when they’re on standby.
It also recommends sorting your apps out by app usage, storage usage, battery usage and data usage to find out which apps are bringing your phone down. In the case of battery usage, if you’re not using an app that uses 5% or more of your battery power, it’s better to get rid of it entirely.
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The Journal app should be no.1
It’s atrocious. Night mode helps a bit but it’s buggy to say the least
I’m not the only one then…journal sucked my phone nearly dry last month…my phone service was starting to send me messages about my data usage!!! Never had that before
Spot on Capt! If I am looking at the J and phone goes into sleep mode (have 2 kids so easily distracted) come back to find my phone power could be halved.
The Journal app should definitely be in there. Constantly getting warnings about it overheating my phone.
Better off using your browser for the journal
I love the journal app but it needs the attention of a good developer.
RTE app was taking leaving my battery dead by 1800hrs just running in the background.
Removed it and now get till bedtime.
Yes… rte is worst app. It was by far the biggest drain on my battery
It drains your IQ also.
This one kinda backfired on the journal I see
Try turning off notifactions on journal.ie and others it helps
did that,it turned it back on when restarting phone,m who write thi article ? asking for trouble , loved the app but had to get rid of it 30-40 per cent of my bttery, unbelievable
Thejournal and the42 is constantly flagged for slowing my phone down , great apps all the same
Reason number ten million to remove facebook.
Get greenify and it will kill them when they’re idle
using apps like greenify, is not recommended, just because greenify kills apps when idle, when in reality, it simply sucks juice to ramp up the CPU during app load at startup, just saying…
Ah yeah they plan that so you have no distractions during the six one
Good to see it wasn’t just me who had problems with RTE app. I’ve been using Android since the beginning and the RTE app is the first I had to remove because of ridiculous battery drain. I haven’t noticed any problems with journal.ie app.
Battery usage on my Samsung S4 – 40% from The Journal App. Deleted it instantly when I found this out. Needless to say my battery lasts much longer.
King must suck at programming
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