What are the Worst Apps for Power (Battery) Use?

[walterwood44]

I got my Evo on the first day it was released. Over the last five months I installed a number of apps, some I use regularly and some I don't. Recently the battery life went down the drain so badly that I reset the phone today and I only want to reinstall selected apps.

But what apps are the most efficient with power usage? Note I am not talking about obvious power drains like leaving 4G or Wi-Fi on where there is no network. I am looking to identify those apps that either through poor design or a bad choice of default settings use too much power. These apps would not be obvious to the average or novice user.

Has anyone made up a list of apps that drain the battery the most? Also, are there settings in these power hungry apps that could be changed to conserve the battery?

Thanks
Walter

 

[jcl_cls01]

eBuddy and Qik suck on my Evo.

 

[Dave Blake]

ESPN sports center app

 

[noshooz]

Angry Birds is another battery hog.

 

[Pre-dawn raid]

Live wallpapers

 

[kamtsa]

Battery Refresh (by Thomas Riley)

;-)

 

[walterwood44]

Live wallpapers

Actually I was running the Water live wallpaper from the beginning and at times got 36 hours of battery even when listening to music. The phone showed only 2% battery use for wallpaper.

 

[pteezay]

I know the aquarium live wallpaper is a huge battery huge, but it looks good.

 

[VDub2174]

The FB app seemed to drain my battery quick.

 

[ballerx43]

Any videochatting app such as qik, fring, imovicha. Any IM client that is not PUSH based and basically anything that runs in the background thatdoesnt have push.. why every single messaging and chat app that's released doesn't take advantage of the push feature offered in Froyo is beyond my knoweledge because then we'd al get amazing batteryclife and be able to use the apps we love

 

[vel7wil]

What I've done is to uninstall all the apps i've purchased (they're still under ur downloads inm the market) i keep just the ones i'm using regularly.....the apps that burn the most power are the ones that update the most often in the background....these can and will drain alot of juice...even with a sparse update intervals

 

[kenlperry]

@Walter,

Based on my personal experience, I tend to disagree with alot of what I'm reading here. I run the Aquarium Live Wallpaper and I have Tango installed. I also have Qik, Fring, Yahoo Messanger with Video Chat, and Skype installed, and I leave them all logged in always. I get what I consider to be great battery life. It varies depending on my usage, but I typically can get between 12-20 hours per charge. I had one app installed a few months ago that seemed like it was affecting my battery. It was TextPlus. When I installed that app my time between charge was reduced to something like 6-8 hours. When I uninstalled the app things went back to normal. In some of the apps I think it's just a matter of going in and modifying settings. I think a list of apps would be a good idea though, if you can get one together...

 

[walterwood44]

Tuesday I reset my phone wiping out all apps. I then installed only a selected set of apps and left them on default settings for refresh, etc. The next day I took the phone off the charger, listened to a 25 minute podcast and viewed two 1 minute videos that were stored on the SD card. No web surfing but Wi-Fi and GPS were enabled. (I normally keep them both off.) The phone only lasted two hours before wanting to be charged again.

One thing I have noticed is that my phone runs very hot to the touch. Obviously generating this heat requires power but I am not sure what is causing this.

I went back to Sprint and after checking it again they suggested replacing the phone. They wanted $35 for this but after talking to a supervisor with Sprint he offered to credit me back the money to my account.

 

[walterwood44]

Replaced my phone and now I am installing one or two apps as needed. After 12 hours I now have at least 50% battery or more.

One post I found that really helps track down battery life is in the "Getting Started with Android" section titled "Extend Your Battery - Speed Up Your Phone". http://forum.androidcentral.com/gen...g-started-android-tips-tricks.html#post400244

I highly recommend reading that post even if you are not having problems.

Walter

 

[npark]

I got my Evo on the first day it was released. Over the last five months I installed a number of apps, some I use regularly and some I don't. Recently the battery life went down the drain so badly that I reset the phone today and I only want to reinstall selected apps.

But what apps are the most efficient with power usage? Note I am not talking about obvious power drains like leaving 4G or Wi-Fi on where there is no network. I am looking to identify those apps that either through poor design or a bad choice of default settings use too much power. These apps would not be obvious to the average or novice user.

Has anyone made up a list of apps that drain the battery the most? Also, are there settings in these power hungry apps that could be changed to conserve the battery?

Thanks
Walter

Walter, I suggest just think about what the app does.

I'm not using any empirical data to support this, but IMHO I think the biggest features that drain battery are:
-3D Graphics/GPU cycles
-Data connection
-GPS

I think those are the biggest hogs. Usually, apps like gmaps would use both Data and GPS which sorta compounds the issue.

Chat programs and other programs that use persistent connections (skype, etc) are drains on battery. For these types of programs, i generally use "mainstream" or enterprise developed apps. Like, "john's IM client" is generally I would say would use power less efficiently than Google Talk.

Anyway, anything you don't need that uses those features just disable. I noticed that bloatware--whereas when inactive don't do much, it's a pain to see NFL always loading when I will never use it. Zap your bloatware, but that will require root. You can also try setCPU.

Lastly, you can try using a different ROM that is more power efficient. =) I'm using Myn's warm 2.2 and colinph battery mod. My battery life is awesome.