Apps
These five apps are causing your phone’s battery to die faster
Research from pCloud ranks some of the most resource demanding smartphone apps.

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We’ve all noticed it. As our smartphones have become more and more advanced, it seems like the batteries are slowly becoming worse. What is more likely happening is that smartphone apps are becoming more demanding as technology improves.
A new study by pCloud, a cloud-based storage app for smartphones, shows how demanding applications have become. By looking at three different factors, researchers were able to rank the most popular apps on a list based on how demanding an app is overall.
The three factors taken into consideration were these: what functions an app uses in the background, how much battery an app uses, and whether or not a dark mode is available. The study then ranks some of the most popular smartphone apps based on how demanding they are. Most of the apps near the top of the list are pretty obvious, but some might surprise you.

The study found that Fitbit, Verizon, Uber, Skype, and Facebook were the top five most demanding applications for smartphones. All of these apps allow for a lot of functions to be running in the background, and none of them, except for Facebook, has a dark mode. Having dark mode can significantly reduce the demand and battery usage required from an app.
It seems like the key here is how much background activity an app requires. All of the most demanding apps require a lot of functions to be running in the background, like Verizon, Uber, and Fitbit. Out of the 14 possible background functions tested, both Uber and Verizon used 13, while Fitbit requires access to all 14 functions.
This study does a good job of breaking down just how much of our smartphone’s resources are being used by certain apps. The research found that social media and dating apps are generally among the most demanding apps. The study looks at 50 total apps, ranking each one from most to least demanding, and some of the revelations are pretty surprising. Now I know why my battery dies every four hours.
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