Keeping your smartphone charged takes constant vigilance sometimes, especially as some apps drain your battery more than others. A study by Alcatel-Lucent suggest that messaging apps tend to drain more power than we realise.
Video services like YouTube and Netflix tend to be the biggest data and battery hogs, but they’re also the most obvious. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger also tend to deplete the battery because they’re always on:
In an attempt to provide users with instant gratification, some apps constantly contact the mobile networks, instructing it to alert the phone whenever an incoming message arrives. This repeatedly wakes the device from its dormant state — serving as a silent battery-killer. To counteract this problem, some apps hold a radio channel open to the device so it can continue sending and receiving messages over a period of time. This also drains the battery…
Among social media apps, BlackBerry Messenger is the chattiest, sending out a radio signal 343 times for every megabyte of data — compared with Windows Live Messenger, which makes five times fewer connections to the network.
If you’re having trouble with your battery, try uninstalling those messaging apps to see if it helps. The full study by Alcatel-Lucent is set to be released tomorrow and will include a more detailed breakdown of exactly what’s going on.
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