Top smartphone-killing apps

Fitbit, Skype, and Uber are the ultimate smartphone battery killers, while social media and streaming apps like Facebook and YouTube are the heaviest on mobile data.

These apps, and several others, are mainly responsible for scenarios where smartphone users are phoneless at the end of the day or dataless by the end of the month.

When it comes to the battery usage of smartphone apps, phone-storage app company pCloud analysed app aspects such as permissions, the battery these apps use, and whether there is a dark mode available.

Combining these aspects, pCloud assigned each popular app a score representing battery usage. The higher the score, the heavier the app is on batteries use, with a maximum score of 100.

When it comes to storage usage, pCloud analysed 100 of the most popular apps to determine how much storage space each uses.

Based on the megabyte size of each app, Uber, TikTok, Facebook, and Facebook take up the most storage space on smartphones.

Video streaming and social media apps tend to be the main culprits for mobile data usage on smartphones.

Battery killers

Fitbit places the most significant drain on smartphone batteries compared to other applications tested as it allows 14 of 16 available features to continue running in the background.

Four of these features — namely the camera, location services, microphone, and Wi-Fi — have been identified to place the highest demand on smartphone batteries.

Six of the top 20 most demanding apps on smartphone batteries are social media apps.

Applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp allow 11 extra features to run in the background, including photos, Wi-Fi, location services, and the device’s microphone.

The chart below shows the top 20 most demanding apps on smartphone batteries.

Storage hoggers

Based solely on install size, Uber takes up the most smartphone storage — 299.6MB — according to pCloud.

Notably, the install sizes of social media apps such as TikTok and Facebook also take up a lot of storage on your mobile device, and the amount of space used will increase as the apps store your data.

An important aspect to consider was the difference in app installation sizes between Android and iOS devices, with applications on iOS being significantly larger.

These differences are due to several factors, including iOS’s requirement for multiple artwork versions for different display sizes and iOS apps including extra copies of the app’s code for various Apple processors.

For the analysis, we averaged the installation sizes of each app on Android and iOS. The chart below shows the top 15 applications that hog smartphone storage.

Data draining apps

Applications that consume the majority of your data are generally the apps you use the most.

These are social media and streaming apps such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix.

Some might access these apps daily or even hourly, but users can take steps to reduce the data consumption of these apps.

Autoplay for videos on social media apps like Facebook and Instagram places a significant burden on your data bundle, and disabling the feature can result in substantial savings.

Video streaming apps such as Netflix and YouTube will adjust quality based on the speed of your mobile connection. With current LTE and 5G speeds, such apps often select high-definition (HD) resolutions.

Loading HD video uses a lot more data than streaming in standard definition (SD).

These video streaming apps often offer the option to stream at lower definitions and only stream in HD when connected to Wi-Fi.

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