When your phone’s battery runs out, you’re usually the only one to blame. But it’s great to have someone else—or rather, something—to pin it on. Phone-storage app company pCloud discovered the apps that drain your battery by analyzing app permissions to find which are operating in your phone whether you’re using them or not.
Cloud storage firm pCloud did some analysis to see which apps are the worst when it comes to draining the battery on your smartphone. The data used to come up with these offensive apps include the applications used by each app (such as camera or location), the battery life used by these applications, and whether Dark Mode is available for a specific app.
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“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,” pCloud said. By those standards, the top five biggest drains are Facebook, Fitbit, Skype, Uber, and Verizon.
Social media apps top the list of apps that drain your battery
Not so coincidentally, the apps that are the biggest time sucks are also among the biggest battery drains. Social media and dating apps are the most guilty of this. Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Snapchat, YouTube, and WhatsApp are in the top 20, and all permit 11 features to run in the background.
Online dating can be emotionally exhausting, and your phone feels the same way. Bumble, Grindr, and Tinder account for 15% of the top apps that drain your battery. They let about 11 features run while you swipe on potential matches
Remember, background activity uses your phone’s battery so apps that do a lot of work while you’re not looking at them are killing your phone. Social media apps made up six of the top 20 phone killers.
| Position | App | Score |
| 3. | Uber | 87% |
| 4. | Skype | 87% |
| 5. | 82% | |
| 8. | 79% | |
| 9. | Tinder | 77% |
| 10. | Bumble | 77% |
| 11. | Snapchat | 77% |
| 12. | 77% | |
| 14. | YouTube | 77% |
| 18. | Grindt | 72% |
| 20. | 72% |
The social media apps include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, YouTube, and LinkedIn. On average, the social media apps had 11 extra applications running in the background including photos, Wi-Fi, locations and the microphone.
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Uber and Skype were numbers 3 and 4 respectively, both with a score of 87%. Dating apps are well represented on the list with Tinder, Bumble and Grindt on the list. All three apps don’t have Dark Mode and on average they have 11 applications running in the background.
If you’re wondering whether Dark Mode can save your battery life, this is only possible on a phone with an OLED screen. That’s because the latter doesn’t need a separate backlight as an LCD panel does. To create the colour black on OLED, it simply requires that the pixels be turned off and since pixels that are off don’t draw power from the battery, the feature can keep your phone running a little longer between charges.
To check for apps that drain your battery on your own device, go into Settings, select Battery, and look at battery usage by app. You just might find that your Twitter habit is 59% of your phone activity.
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