In an era where smartphone manufacturers relentlessly highlight processing power and camera capabilities, a more fundamental user concern often goes unaddressed: battery longevity. Despite advances in battery technology and power-efficient chipsets, many users find their devices struggling to last through a full day. A revealing study conducted by the UK telecommunications firm Elevate, as reported by Yahoo, confirms this widespread experience, indicating a significant shift from 2019 when phones commonly endured a day and a half. Today, daily charging has become the norm. While increased screen time and more demanding applications contribute to this drain, the study pinpointed specific popular apps as primary culprits, often due to intensive background processes that continue to consume power long after the app is closed. Identifying and managing these apps can be a crucial step in reclaiming control over your device’s endurance.
Netflix: The Top Battery Consumer
As the world’s leading streaming service, Netflix offers an unparalleled library of content with a highly polished user experience. However, this comes at a significant cost to battery life. Elevate’s study crowned Netflix as the most battery-draining app, consuming a staggering 1,500% of a full battery charge per month on average. This extreme figure is the product of substantial user engagement—approximately 60 hours of monthly screen time—combined with nearly 13 hours of background processes. Streaming high-definition video is inherently power-intensive, requiring constant data processing and screen illumination. The alarming takeaway is that even when not actively streaming, the app’s background activity continues to levy a quiet toll on your battery, making it a major factor in accelerated daily drain for regular viewers.
TikTok: The Background Process Heavyweight
The short-form video platform TikTok ranks as the second most draining application. With its addictive, endlessly scrolling feed of algorithmically served content, users spend an average of 33 hours per month in the app. This activity alone accounts for substantial battery use, but the more telling metric is its background operation. TikTok was found to run background processes for nearly 10 hours monthly, a figure only three hours less than Netflix despite having almost half the active screen time. This indicates that the app maintains a high level of background activity, likely for preloading content, tracking engagement metrics, and managing notifications. This persistent operation means the app continues to deplete your battery long after you’ve stopped watching, contributing to its overall drain of 825% of a full charge per month.
YouTube: High-Per-Hour Video Drain
As the internet’s primary video repository, YouTube is a default app on many devices and a daily destination for millions. Its battery impact is predictably severe. The study found that YouTube consumes approximately 540% of a full battery charge monthly. More specifically, it drains about 20% of a total charge per hour of active viewing—a rate that can quickly cripple a phone during extended use. In addition to this foreground consumption, the app also runs background processes for six to seven hours each month. Whether watching long-form documentaries, live streams, or short clips, YouTube’s combination of video decoding, network activity, and screen-on time makes it one of the most efficient battery depleters in any user’s app portfolio.
Threads: Meta’s Text-Based Battery Hog
Meta’s text-centric social platform, Threads, launched as a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), demonstrates that even apps focused primarily on text can be significant battery offenders. According to the study, Threads consumes 460% of a full battery charge monthly. This drain stems from a combination of active scrolling and, more notably, 6.9 hours of average monthly background operation. Like many social media apps, Threads is designed to maintain real-time connectivity for notifications and content refreshes, processes that prevent the app from fully sleeping. Its placement on this list serves as a reminder that battery drain is not exclusive to video services; any app with aggressive background synchronization and network polling can substantially impact daily battery life.
Snapchat: Stealthy Background Drain
The ephemeral messaging app Snapchat rounds out the list, consuming 320% of a full battery charge per month. What makes Snapchat particularly noteworthy is the breakdown of its consumption: the study found that fully half of its battery use originated from background activity, not from the 16 hours of average monthly screen time. This highlights a critical issue with many modern social apps—they are engineered to run persistently in the background to enable instant messaging, location tracking for Snap Map, and media processing. This design ensures a seamless user experience but at the direct expense of battery longevity, making Snapchat a significant, often overlooked, contributor to daily drain.
Managing App Battery Impact
Understanding which apps are the most draining is the first step toward mitigation. Users can take proactive measures within their device settings to curb this consumption. On both iOS and Android, navigating to battery settings reveals a detailed breakdown of app-specific usage, distinguishing between foreground and background activity. For the worst offenders, consider restricting background app refresh, disabling unnecessary location permissions, or enabling low power modes that limit background activity. For video streaming apps, downloading content over Wi-Fi for offline viewing can reduce the constant cellular or Wi-Fi radio use during playback. Regularly auditing and uninstalling unused apps that may run background processes can also yield surprising improvements. Ultimately, while these popular apps offer immense utility and entertainment, being mindful of their power costs and adjusting their settings is essential for extending your smartphone’s operational life between charges.
