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Bad iPhone battery life? Avoid these 10 power-hungry smartphone apps

Smartphones often won't get us through an entire day, but cutting back on your usage of certain apps could help improve your phone's battery life

IS your smartphone always running low on battery life? A power-hungry app could be to blame.

A new report reveals the apps that are guilty of drawing the highest amounts of battery power, and could be draining your phone dry.

 Some apps drain more battery life than others
Some apps drain more battery life than othersCredit: Getty - Contributor

It turns out that some of the biggest offenders are hugely popular apps, including Facebook, Snapchat, and Netflix.

The research comes courtesy of mobile security firm Avast, which drew data from more than 3 million Android smartphone users.

The results were split into two different categories: apps that run when you start your phone up, and apps that you manually launch yourself.

Here are the biggest battery-draining apps that run in the background on your phone:

 These are the worst apps for draining your battery life in the background
These are the worst apps for draining your battery life in the backgroundCredit: Avast

Two of Samsung's apps take top spot, but other common apps include Google Maps, WhatsApp, and Facebook.

Google Maps regularly tracks your location to help provide better services, while Facebook and WhatsApp are constantly connected to the network to make sure you're notified about incoming messages.

There are also some apps that smartphone users intentionally launch that also drain battery, however.

These are some of the user-launched power-gulping apps:

 These are the most power-hungry apps that you manually launch
These are the most power-hungry apps that you manually launchCredit: Avast

So what can you do to reduce your battery life burn? According to Avast, it's just about changing your habits.

"If battery life is an issue, turn off push notifications from messaging apps or cut down on sending, or watching multimedia files while on the go, as these activities can drain battery life," the company explains.

It's also worth remembering that smartphone batteries degrade over time, so it's likely that your phone will run out of charger quicker if you've owned it for several years.

For instance, an iPhone will hold just 80% of its original first-bought battery life after charging it from zero to full 500 times.

The only real long-term solution is for companies to work harder at boosting battery life on their smartphones, which we have no control over anyway.


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