Phone battery life stress: Indonesians suffer more than anyone in the world

Photo credit: Tamara Sanderson.

Smartphone battery life stress – which turns into a panic as soon as you hear the first warning at 20 percent – is something we’re all familiar with. But it’s the tap-happy people of Indonesia who know the terror of a soon-to-be-dead battery better than anyone else on the planet, according to a report out today.

While the global average phone battery life is 21.7 hours, Indonesians get only 12.8 hours. That’s not even a full waking day.

That level of smartphone addiction contributes to Asia having the lowest average – just 19.3 hours of phone juice. Folks in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands stretch it more than any other region: 27.2 hours, says the data from tech giant Baidu, which looked only at Android phones.

The country that somehow gets the most juice? Germany. Its populace manages a dreamy 32.1 hours.

Apps that zap your juice

Indonesia’s hunger for smartphones shouldn’t be a surprise. The capital, Jakarta, was crowned the world’s number one Twitter city back in 2011, which helped cement its reputation in the intervening years as a powerhouse of social media trends. With a population of a quarter of a billion, many of whom have skipped the PC era and jumped straight into being mobile netizens, the country is the world’s third biggest user base of Facebook.

The report draws no conclusions about phone usage or precisely why Indonesians get the least far with their mobiles – is it because of cheap smartphones? too much Facebooking? – but it does point fingers at some battery-draining apps. Snapchat, Candy Crush Saga, and Clash of Clans are among the apps wasting the most power both while being used and while idling in the background. Uber also gets a ticking off for silently imbibing your battery life without you even realizing it.

In contrast, Spotify, Viber, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Line, and Instagram receive a pat on the back for sipping very little of your precious phone power.

The report’s data was compiled by M2 Catalyst and App Annie, and was analyzed and consolidated by Baidu’s DU Global Battery Labs team.