Kim Kardashian doesn’t look like she works very hard in her reality show, but her game is definitely making your phone sweat.
Some of today’s top mobile games don’t make millions of dollars by going easy on your smartphone and tablet hardware. In fact, they are often one of the biggest drains on the performance of iOS and Android devices, according to utility developer Cheetah Mobile. Games like Bejeweled and Candy Crush Saga require ample storage space and a ton of memory when running. That can cause your battery to poop out much faster than if you were just using your iPhone to text or send email.
The app-utility maker Cheetah Mobile produced the following chart that reveals just how much of your phone these games are using:
Above: How some top games are using memory, storage space, and more.
Cheetah Mobile tested out Bejeweled, Candy Crush Saga, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, and The Room. The company checked to see how much memory (or RAM) each game used, how much storage space they required, and how much unnecessary data each game kept around.
Candy Crush Saga, the popular puzzle game that has players matching up sweets to score points, easily used the most memory at an average of 97.8 MBs. That includes data is using in the foreground and in the background. Using that much RAM will quickly deplete the battery, and it can even impact the performance of the system overall. The Room, a brain-teasing adventure game with 3D graphics, also uses a big chunk of memory — although it’s strange that a 2D game like Candy Crush Sag uses more than 50 percent more RAM than a game with three-dimensional art.
We checked ourselves, and found that Candy Crush Saga’s memory usage can get up to as high as 300 MB while in use. That’s more than Google Chrome’s 166 MBs of RAM.
Above: A look at RAM usage after just a few minutes of playing Candy Crush Saga.
As for storage, Kim Kardashian is the biggest offender among the five that Cheetah tested. It uses 109MBs, and it even keeps more than 20 MBs of cache, or temporary junk files, on your system as well. Everything you have installed on your phone uses storage, and bigger files means your device can hold fewer games, songs, and movies.
Cheetah Mobile has some tips. Of course, one of them is to use its apps to clean up junk files off your phone, but you could use competing apps like Battery Saver or even built in tools on Android and iOS to monitor your usage. But the company does point out that you should also close games when you’re not using them. Candy Crush Saga running in the background is still gonna use a ton of memory, and that’s just an unnecessary drag on your hardware. Shut that thing all the way down when you’re not using it. The next time you start it up, it may take a bit longer to load, but that’s the price you pay for battery life.