‘Facebook Messenger and BBM drain the battery fastest on smartphones’

BBM, Viber and Facebook Messenger are some of the apps that drain the battery on smartphones the most. That says network company Alcatel-Lucent based on an analysis of network traffic on mobile networks around the world.

WhatsApp, Twitter and the normal Facebook app have much less impact on the battery life of smartphones, Alcatel-Lucent claims in a report published Wednesday. The company bases this on its own figures about how many apps are involved in signalling and therefore sets up a network connection with the mast of a mobile network to check whether there are notifications. Alcatel-Lucent has this data because it supplies and manages the equipment for many providers in North America and Europe, among others.

Signaling is a major factor in smartphone battery depletion, so those network-level apps have the most impact on battery life, the network administrator says. Other factors that influence the battery life have not been taken into account, such as the use of GPS in apps, for example, and the power required to use the display by the app.

BlackBerry Messenger ranks highest on the battery-guzzling apps ranking, followed by Yahoo Messenger, Viber and Facebook Messenger. WhatsApp and Skype finish a lot lower on that list. Alcatel-Lucent also concludes that Google Maps is a bigger drain on battery life than Apple Maps; Apple’s service consumes more data, but Google needs fourteen signaling events per MB of data, Apple only nine. In any case, Android does much more signaling than iOS, so that Android phones will be empty more often, the network company claims.

In any case, Facebook has taken the report seriously, Alcatel-Lucent said. Following the findings of an earlier version of this report, Facebook modified its app, after which total signaling traffic on mobile networks fell by around 5 percent.