Secret Phone Killers

Ivan Dimitrov | 10th May 2021

Secret Phone Killers – Which apps are the most demanding on your phone?

Nowadays there is an app for everything, and in a world consumed by technology having phone storage and battery has never been more essential. From Pinterest to pilates, train tickets to Tinder, apps are beginning to take over our phones as they become more demanding, causing our batteries to die quicker.

With 93% of smartphone users admitting to using apps daily, our phone batteries are starting to suffer, leaving us phoneless by the end of the day. We wanted to find out the apps that are the most demanding on our phone, so conducted a study to discover which apps are the secret phone killers.

By analysing 100 of the most popular apps, we were able to conclude which apps were not only draining our phone batteries the most, but also taking up the most memory and slowing them down.

The most demanding apps on your phone

When looking at which apps are the most demanding on our phones, we analysed three things: the applications each app uses, such as location or camera, the battery these applications use and whether dark mode is available.

By combining the results of these three factors, we were able to calculate which of the 100 most popular apps are the most demanding and crown them the ultimate phone killers.

Fitbit and Verizon ruled as the ultimate phone killers!

Fitbit and Verizon came out on top as the ultimate phone killers. Both apps permit 14 out of the 16 available features to run in the background, specifically including the four most demanding: the camera, location, microphone and Wifi connection. This earned these apps the highest score in the study – 92.31%.

Social media dominate the top 20 apps for draining your battery

Collectively, social media apps make up six out of the 20 most demanding apps on your phone battery. On average, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, WhatsApp and Linkedin permit 11 extra features to run in the background, such as photos, wifi, locations and the microphone. All of these require more power to run and ultimately demand more from your phone and its battery.

Also, out of these six social media apps only Instagram allows dark mode, which can save up to 30% more battery life on a phone. The only other social media app to allow this feature is Twitter – potentially explaining why it didn’t make the top 20.

Online dating has never been more demanding!

Our study found that online dating drains your phone battery just as much as your emotions. Online dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble and Grinder make up 15% of the top killer apps, allowing on average 11 features to run in the background.

All three dating apps don’t have dark mode available and therefore require more energy when using them, causing the battery to drain quicker.

The top 50 secret phone killers

The apps taking up the most memory on your phone

The average phone can hold up to 64GB of inbuilt storage, with the operating system roughly taking up to 10GB. To take into account how much storage space apps require, we looked at 100 of the top apps and collected how much MB of space each one needs.

Travel apps hold the most amount of storage

The United Airlines app takes up the largest amount of phone storage, requiring 437.8MB of space, followed by the Lyft app, requiring 325.1MB of space and Uber requiring 299.6MB. All of these apps need ample amounts of space, and as a result will slow down your phone and eat up your storage.

Luckily, travel apps like United Airlines can be easily disposed of when you’re not on holiday, and should be the first to be deleted when considering how to free up phone storage. Also, alternative airlines such as Ryanair only require 109.2MB of storage and Jet2 47.3MB – both of which can be easily exchanged.

However, apps like Lyft and Uber are more of a necessity when it comes to having easy transportation on a daily basis. Rather than deleting both of them, be sure to only have one reliable transportation app, therefore freeing up space for other apps and allowing your phone to run quicker.

Switch out Microsoft Teams for alternative conferencing apps

Microsoft Teams has become a staple app for numerous companies around the world as working from home and online meetings become the norm. However, this video conferencing app requires 232.2MB of space in comparison to Zoom, which only requires 82.1MB of space and Skype which requires 111.2MB. These easy alternatives can help reduce the amount of space your phone has free, and will also help to keep your phone running smoothly.

Sticking to one food delivery service could save storage space

Uber Eats, My Mcdonalds and Yelp Food all make it in the top 30 apps eating up your storage. To reduce the amount of storage space being used and also improve the speed of your phone, try sticking to just one food delivery app. Numerous food apps hold the same or similar restaurants, therefore one should suffice or meet the needs of the majority. Or, if you want to try multiple food apps be sure to delete and redownload them when necessary.

Overall, the study clearly indicates that social media apps are still one of the biggest phone killers when it comes to draining your battery. However, it also highlights that apps such as fitness or travel – which require multiple applications to run in the background – are even more demanding on our phone’s battery and storage systems.

How pCloud can save your phone

pCloud is an easy to use app which allows you to store all of your photos, videos and files in one place. Not only will this help to free up your phone storage but it will also increase the speed of your device.

To find out more on how to store all of your files with pCloud, check out our online cloud storage facilities and save up to 10 GB of storage for free!

Methodology

We analysed popular apps permissions using to understand which apps demanded the most from our phones at any given time.

Each “demand” e.g. Wifi was then weighted based on its perceived battery consumption to give a weighted total demand. If an app had access to a larger total of battery draining permissions it would be ranked highly as a phone killer

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