admin The top 10 battery draining apps on iPhone
Please note that these are the top ten apps that drain my iPhone battery. Your apps may be different, although many of the apps below are very popular in the App Store. For more obscure uses, I’ve included some similar uses for perspective –– these asides may or may not have similar problems.
#1 Movements
Battery life sucked from my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Moves is a popular pedometer motion tracking app owned by Facebook. It uses the M7 and M8 motion coprocessor to track your steps and GPS to track your location. Both tasks are battery-hungry beasts, which is why just running Moves (or most other motion tracking apps) on my iPhone gives me 2 hours and 15 minutes of battery life per day.
#2 BT Wi-Fi
Battery life sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 1 hour 42 minutes.
BT Wi-Fi is an app that allows you to join all the free BT hotspots across the country. It constantly sends Wi-Fi pings to see if you’re near a BT Wi-Fi zone you can connect to when you’re out and about. Because of this (Wi-Fi takes up a lot of battery life), BT Wi-Fi means you have 1 hour and 42 minutes less battery life every day. Other Wi-Fi hotspot apps may be similar.
#3 Google Search
Battery life sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 1 hour 24 minutes.
The Google Search app gives you Google Now capabilities on your iPhone. But the app also has powerful location tracking features, saving you 1 hour and 24 minutes of battery life every day.
#4 Facebook Messenger
Battery life sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 1 hour 20 minutes.
Yes, just having Facebook Messenger on my iPhone reduces my battery life by 1 hour and 20 minutes.
#5 Facebook
Battery life was bad for my iPhone during a normal day: 1 hour and 15 minutes.
I’m seeing a theme with Facebook-owned apps. The regular Facebook app reduces your daily battery life by 1 hour and 15 minutes.
#6 Google Hangouts
The battery life has been sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 1 hour and 9 minutes.
Another Google app that destroys your battery life. Using Hangouts will reduce your daily battery life by 1 hour and 9 minutes.
#7 H&M
The battery life has been sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 1 hour and 9 minutes.
This app was a surprise to me because I hardly ever open it. Yet H&M still sucked 1 hour and 9 minutes off my daily battery life.
#8 WhatsApp
Battery life sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 58 minutes.
Another app I don’t use often, but WhatsApp used up 58 minutes of my battery life per day.
#9 Google Maps
Battery life sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 52 minutes.
Frankly, I’m surprised Google Maps doesn’t eat up more than 52 minutes of my battery life per day, considering the amount of use I get from it.
#10 Viber
Battery life sucked out of my iPhone over the course of a normal day: 43 minutes.
This one was shocking because I use Viber maybe once a week. Still, it ate up 43 minutes of my battery life per day.
So, what can you do?
Normal recommends avoiding the apps that you don’t use too much and that eat up your battery life. As you can see from my list, that’s usually not practical. Sure, you can force close an app when you’re done with it, but even then it’s usually still using some background processes (to provide location services or push notifications). Until these developers make further optimizations to their app’s battery usage, the best way to extend battery life is to optimize battery usage elsewhere on your iPhone and disable background app refreshing in Settings.
For even more options, see How to improve iPhone battery life guide.
Batteries have actually gotten better
To Apple’s credit, both the software and hardware in the iPhone XR and iPhone XS MAX have gotten MUCH better. I know it doesn’t seem like the iPhone’s battery life has improved all that much (from 8 to 10 to about 12 hours of mixed use), but when you consider the much bigger and better screens the iPhone now has, and the more powerful processors, more RAM, and a better GPU — not to mention the many extra sensors packed into it — the fact that battery life has increased at all is astonishing.
If you were to put all the hardware from the latest iPhone into a device with the battery and software from the original iPhone (iPhone 1.0), that phone would have a battery life of about 2 hours. As you can see, we’ve come a long way in hardware and operating system optimization, allowing for much better battery life rather than minimal battery technology gains. Unfortunately, not all third-party apps are as optimized for battery life as iOS and the iPhone’s hardware.
Where these battery analyzes come from
For the past few months I’ve been using an app called Normal: Battery Analysis (£0.69) that measures the power consumption of my apps over time. The app identifies the worst battery hogs on my device and shows me a graph for each app that simply explains how much battery life you’ll get if you delete the app completely. Because the Normal analyzes are more accurate over a longer period of time, it is advisable to use the app on your iPhone a few weeks in advance to get a clearer idea of what is draining your battery.
