Snapchat, Facebook, musical.ly, and Tinder among top gobblers of battery, storage and data
London, UK. What do Tinder, Snapchat, Spotify, and Wattpad all have in common? Avast, the leader in digital security products for consumers and businesses, found they are all top performance drainers on Android phones when run by users, according to the Avast Android App Performance & Trend Report for Q3 2016. Avast calculated the total performance drain of the Android apps on people’s phones by combining their impact on battery life, storage capacity and data plan usage to reveal the top 20 greediest apps. News apps Daily Mail Online and ynet were two of the new entrants in the charts this quarter, joining regulars Facebook, Instagram and messaging app WhatsCall in the top ten chart for greediest apps that run automatically on a phone.
A number of new apps also entered the top ten charts in this quarter for the first time, including:
- Musical.ly: with an estimated 150 million teens lip-syncing to the latest tunes, musical.ly has been a massive hit. However, in internal tests, it only took two hours to drain a fully charged battery when watching clips back-to-back. Spending a few minutes watching 25 clips back to back also drained 100MB of data; doing this every day for a month would exceed 3GB of data, which is more than the average user data plan. It also consumed the most storage space on smartphones taking the number one position as the heaviest storage hog.
- WhatsCall: a relatively new competitor to Skype, this app drains smartphones with its ongoing background activity, even if you are not making calls. This app also ranked 6th for the top data plan/traffic consuming apps.
- Wattpad: it’s likely this app has found itself third overall because of its notifications and followers features, which constantly check for new books.
- Jehovah’s Witness: this official app produced by Jehovah’s Witnesses was the heaviest user of smartphone storage. It allows users to download their Bible (in all languages) and browse a library of video tutorials and introductions in high-resolution. All this rich, multimedia content comes at a cost – our tests indicated around 2GB for downloading the scripture and 3GB for watching the introduction videos.
- TayuTau Pedometer: fitness fanatics may have found their phones got a workout too after using this pedometer app, ranking at number 7. Internal tests showed a 50 minute run drained the battery by 31%, and even a five minute walked caused a 3% drain, with the screen mostly off.
- Notable mentions: Tinder was in the top ten for both data plan/traffic drainers and battery drainers. OLX Classifieds, which previously dropped out of the rankings altogether in Q2 2015, re-emerged in the top 10 battery drainers category. The apps for two national UK newspapers, Daily Mail and The Guardian ranked among the top storage eaters and data plan/traffic drainers respectively.
- Most improved:a number of apps had improved their performance enough to drop out of the top 10 charts this quarter: these included messaging apps ChatOn, Kik Messenger, WhatsApp and WeChat, as well as SoundCloud, Mozilla Browser and BBC iPlayer.
Gagan Singh, SVP and GM Mobile Business, Avast, said, “With smartphones taking center stage in our digital lives, people’s expectations are not only to be safe online, but to have a great experience. Our research helps us identify all of the challenges our customers are facing in using their mobile devices and allows us to provide useful insights and advice. These app performance charts are a great example of helping users understand how they can manage their app usage thoughtfully in order to get the most out of their devices, without limiting enjoyment of their favorite apps.”
An all-in-one cleaner and optimizer like AVG CleanerTM for AndroidTM, an Avast product, can help keep tabs on the top mobile resource-hogging apps on your devices. The full report can be downloaded here.
Methodology
The AVG App Report was gathered from a sample of aggregated and anonymized data from more than 3 million Android users around the globe. The app data included in this report covers a time period of July 2016 through September 2016 and only includes Google Play applications where AVG observed a minimum sample size of 50,000 usage incidents.
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