The smartphone apps bleeding your battery dry

For all the good that smartphones have delivered - convenience, connectivity and mobility - there's still the eternal problem of battery charge, or lack thereof. You'd think by now that we'd have a solution to this endlessly irritating problem, but most smartphone users still need to recharge on a daily basis. At least.

So, what's chewing up that battery life? Well, it could be a number of things, but some apps are definitely worse than others.

The worst offenders

There's the obvious, such as map apps, which constantly use your phone's GPS location service. Then there's the sneaky - if you're taking lots of photos without turning off geolocation services, you'll find the battery drains a lot quicker. Weather apps also take their toll, given that they constantly refresh to compensate for changes in location and weather conditions.

Keeping connected will cost you - social media apps are high on the list. Facebook and Skype both maintain a server connection unless you close them out and constantly refresh when running in the background. Twitter isn't  much better.

While it may seem obvious that games will suck the life right out of your phone (and yourself if you aren't careful!), beware of those with in-game advertising. Those pop-ups can contribute significantly to battery drain.

A recent report on tech-site Lifehacker (somewhat surprisingly) identified the Telstra Corporation 24x7 app as the single biggest user of battery life on Android phones in Australia. Snapchat, Shazam, Twitter and TripAdvisor all featured in the top 10.

Reducing the impact

Of course, there's a few things you can do to extend battery life, but they tend to feel like concessions - like wearing an extra layer of clothes at home instead of turning on the heater. It makes sense to turn off location services, for instance, but the prompts to turn back on when you start an app that utilises location can be irritating. Ditto turning off Wi-Fi. It would be a whole lot easier if we could just improve battery technology enough to give us a couple of blissful battery-charged days. We live in hope.