Facebook is biggest drain on smartphone performance: study

It seems that the more socially connected you are, the more likely your smartphone's battery is running almost on empty.

And not because those consumers are always updating their status, sharing images or waiting for the latest viral video. Different apps put a strain on a smartphone in different ways and, according to online security company AVG Technologies, social media apps have the biggest impact, followed by games and shopping apps.

AVG's data comes via its own app, currently installed on over 1 million Android devices. It measures how installed apps dent smartphone performance and results are collated and presented every quarter.

At the top of the list is Facebook which, thanks to the app being always running in the background monitoring activity on the network and sending notifications, has the biggest overall drain.

Facebook topped the list in the last quarter too but climbing in this quarter's results is Spotify. AVG's aggregated, anonymous data shows that the music-streaming app is now running on over 600,000 handsets included in its study and its impact on a handset's storage capacity and data consumption has pushed it into second.

Games can have a huge impact on a smartphone or tablet's free storage space and at the moment the titles that take up the most space are Boom Beach and Deer Hunter 2014.

However, despite growing popularity, one app sliding down the charts is Netflix. Thanks to a November update the app is no longer in the top three for battery drain.

Amazon's main shopping app is now in the top five for overall device performance drain and AVG notes that the app saw increasing use as consumers shopped for Thanksgiving and for Christmas.

There are a host of apps for Android that promise to keep unruly apps in check and to keep a device performing at optimum level but AVG's results show that some, such as Clean Master, actually put more strain on battery, speed, available storage capacity and on data.

'What surprised us,' said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Chief Technology Officer, AVG Technologies, '...was that some of those tools and security updates aimed at improving your phone experience, were in fact impacting it quite heavily.... 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.'

Top apps for overall performance drain
1 Facebook
2 Spotify
3 Instagram
4 Path
5 Amazon Shopping