Games, Music and Shopping Apps Hit Smartphones Hardest
AVG Android App Performance Report for Q4 2014 reveals the latest storage eating, battery draining and mobile data hogging apps clogging your devices
Music lovers, smartphone shoppers and mobile gamers could find their favorite apps are the ones eating up most of their battery life, data plan and phone storage. The results of the latest app performance research from AVG Technologies, N.V. (NYSE: AVG), the online security company™ for 197 million active users, rank the popular music streaming service Spotify, new games like DEER Hunter 2014, and even the Amazon shopping app as among the most resource hungry apps globally. The quarterly AVG Android App Performance Report analyses aggregated, anonymous data – from over one million AVG Android app users in Australia and around the world – to discover the top performance-affecting apps.
Installed on over 600,000 devices across AVG’s user base, popular Spotify has moved up two places from where AVG had ranked it in Q3 to take second position behind the social networking app from Facebook, whose constant background notification checks still have the greatest impact on overall Android device performance, consistent with last quarter’s findings. In Australia, Facebook and Instagram took out the top two spots across the performance draining, storage eating and network traffic hog categories of the research. The top three battery drainers, as triggered by users, were Telstra, Weatherzone and Snapchat. Worldwide, there were four major new trends among AVG users, as identified in the latest report:
- Game On: demonstrating the ever-changing gaming landscape, last quarter’s gaming chart toppers, FarmVille and Puzzle & Dragons, showed major declines in their installed user base, contributing to the reason they dropped out of the AVG Q4 performance rankings. They are replaced by new entrants, Boom Beach for overall impact and Deer Hunter 2014 for storage consumption.
- Seasonal Shopping Fever: over the holiday shopping and sales period, the official Amazon for Android app entered the charts this quarter, ranked number five in the top 10 list of most all-round resource-consuming apps.
- Home Cinema Gets Smart: previously listed in the top three battery draining apps, Netflix this quarter no longer appears in the tables at all following a November update that has resulted in significantly less battery drain. Good news for film fans!
- Helping Hands that Hinder: tools like Clean Master or background apps like Samsung’s Security Policies designed to help keep smartphones secure and smooth, actually rank among the highest drainers of battery, storage and data plan.
“In this quarter’s app report we saw some expected seasonal changes in the app landscape, such as uplift in usage of social, purchasing and GPS-based location apps,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Chief Technology Officer, AVG Technologies. “What surprised us, however, was that some of those tools and security updates aimed at improving your phone experience, were in fact impacting it quite heavily. This is not something most people would expect so we hope our report will encourage people to understand how to manage their apps to prevent them impacting negatively on their favorite mobile past-times.” The full report, which breaks down the performance impact further according to battery drain, storage consumption and data traffic, can be downloaded from AVG Now.
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