Avast Lists Jehovah Witness, Facebook, Snapchat, others among Top Apps Draining Your Phone

Antivirus firm Avast claims to have highlighted a number of popular dating, music streaming, personal interest and social network apps that take the battery juice out of your Android devices. According to a recent research report from the popular security provider, smartphone owners looking to speed-up their devices should ditch certain popular social network, dating, fitness and music applications to boost performance.

Recently, Avast Software released a new report unveiling the most battery- and storage-draining apps for Android. From news to new friends, the functionality of the apps in question span a wide range, but they’re all connected by a penchant for sucking the life out of your battery.

The global Avast Android Performance & Trend Report reveals the top overall performance-draining apps. Facebook-owned properties took three of the top spots, including the Facebook app itself. Second place went to musical.ly, a relatively new app that lets you record a 15 second clip of you and your friends lip-syncing to a popular song. It’s proven wildly successful, with more than 100 million users watching and uploading clips, but in Avast’s tests, it managed to drain Samsung Galaxy S6 from 100 percent to empty in just 2 hours.

According to their research, the official Jehovah’s Witnesses app, Skype-competitor WhatsCall, bookworms’ favourite Wattpad and TayuTau Pedometer, join perennial performance-hoggers like Tinder, Snapchat, Facebook and Spotify.

Avast also has some advice for the New Year:

It said: "Feeling that post-Christmas slump? Time to reach for the running gear to work off all that turkey and your favourite fitness apps. These apps are all the rage, but they’re also heavy battery drainers and a case in point is TayuTau Pedometer.

"A great app for tracking how many steps you’ve taken, how many calories you’ve burned and how far you have walked, it also ranks at number seven in the top drainers as it runs automatically in the background on Android phones without you needing to start it up. "Taking it on a 7 mile run lasting 50 minutes drained the battery of our test phone by 31 per cent! Make sure you have charged up before you head out of the house."

Bookworms are likely to be frustrated that Wattpad was ranked in third place in Avast's list of the most resource heavy apps overall. This is likely caused by its notifications and followers features, which constantly check for new books and act more like Facebook than a true reading app. If you want to limit the drain on your phone, best go to the Settings section and turn off all notifications.

However, it is the official app produced by Jehovah’s Witnesses that tops the charts this quarter for being one of the heaviest users of smartphone storage, as it allows users to download their bible in multiple languages, as well as letting them browse a huge library of high-resolution video tutorials.

If you are keen to get hold of this content, Avast Antivirus recommends deleting the videos once you’ve watched them to free up your storage. Avast collated the report based on anonymous data from over three million smartphone users, which revealed the apps that are sucking power, data and storage from your smartphone without you even realizing.