How do games like Candy Crush, Bejeweled, and Kim Kardashian Hollywood affect your phone?

For many smartphone owners, downloading games may not seem like a big deal. Download Candy Crush, play a few levels, decide you hate it, and delete it. Go on to download the next big game. But what you may not realize, and what I didn't realize until it was actually pointed out to me, is the lasting impact these games may have on your phone.

Cheetah Mobile, developer of the Clean Master and Battery Doctor apps, performed a little study in which they looked into some of the top gaming apps — Bejeweled, Candy Crush, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood — to reveal the amount of memory they take up, the amount of space they occupy, and the amount of "junk" they leave behind on your phone, slowing it down and draining your battery.

The results below are just a broad recap of what they found when analyzing the data.

• Bejeweled: has a lot of baggage, the app has the 2nd highest amount of storage occupied of all the five apps
• Candy Crush: needs a lot of space, when playing the app consumes nearly 100 megabytes of memory space
• Farmville: travels light, with very little junk or cache left behind on a user’s phone
• Kim Kardashian Hollywood: like the Kardashians, this app goes big. The amount of space needed to download this game is more than 100 megabytes, the highest out of all five apps reviewed
• The Room: actually doesn’t need a lot of room, this game takes up the least amount of storage.

So what can you do to help improve our phone's performance?

• Close the app! When you are not playing, make sure to completely close the app which will help with the memory. This way, the app doesn’t continue to run and use battery when it is no longer being actively used.
• Clear memory, junk and viruses. Clean Master is a top-rated app that helps to clean unwanted junk and cache files that slow your phone’s performance. Their newest feature has a cooling mechanism, Device Cooler, to help maintain your phone’s temperature while gaming.
• Know what you are downloading and what information you are allowing the app access to. Review the size, requirements and permissions an app requests before you install.

Now you know exactly what your games are doing, and knowing is half the battle.