When you upgrade your cell phone, you usually do so because you want a better phone. Each year, cell phone manufacturers improve the chips, speed, internet, screen refresh rates and more. Everyone from Samsung to Apple is in a constant race to be the best and stay ahead of the technology curve. They each make wild claims about having the best cell phones but quite often, they don’t provide much evidence. This is where benchmark apps come in. If you’re running on Android, you can find the best benchmark apps for Android in the Google Play Store.
These benchmark apps will allow you to run tests to see just how efficient your device is. Best of all, most benchmark apps for Android are free. We’ve done a round-up of the best benchmark apps for Android so you can see just how good your new cell phone or Android tablet is.
AnTuTu Benchmark
AnTuTu Benchmark is a very popular benchmarking tool for Android that you can download for free. This extensive app will let you see how your cell phone stacks up against the rest of the market with its neat features. With AnTuTu Benchmark, you can test your CPU, GPU, I/O, RAM, and much more.
AnTuTu Benchmark will also give you an overall score for your cell phone UX (User Experience) and does so in the form of two sub-scores, Multitask and Runtime. The UX score gives you an idea of how well your phone operates in the real world. AnTuTu gives you an overall score for your cell phone which doesn’t mean much on its own but if you get a score of 1000 for example, and then you ran the same test on another cell phone and you got a score of 2000, you’d know the other phone was twice as fast.
Geekbench 3
If you’re after a beginner-friendly benchmark app for Android, Geekbench 3 is designed to display your benchmarks in a simple way. When you open the app, you’ll see a single button that you’ll need to press. Once you have, you get a good amount of information back about your Android device.
Geekbench 3 includes 15 new benchmark tests that are designed to model real-world processor-intensive tasks. The new tests cover a number of different application domains, including encryption, image processing, signal processing, and physics simulation. Geekbench 3 includes 12 completely rewritten benchmark tests from Geekbench 2. These tests are now more representative of real-world applications and usage scenarios.
Along with that, Geekbench 3 has been specifically designed to test multi-core processors, but it also still tests single-core performance. This is because many apps and processes use only a single core, making it an important metric. So Geekbench 3 helps you not only determine which devices have the best overall performance but the best performance per core as well.
3D Mark
3D Mark is a free benchmark app for Android that is made specifically for gamers. This app will show you different benchmark scores but primarily focuses on your Android device’s RAM so you can see if your cell phone or tablet can handle those big, exciting games you want to download! If you want to discover your device’s GPU, you can do that too so you can be sure you have an adequate graphical processing unit.
Speedtest.net
Speedtest.net is a little different from the other best benchmark apps for Android. It doesn’t test the different benchmarks on your Android device but instead tests the internet speed of your device. You’ll get a good idea of your bandwidth and whether your Internet Service Provider was telling the truth or not. The app is available as a desktop app and also a mobile app.
A1 SD Bench
A1 SD Bench is another specialist app that tests the benchmark scores of your SD cards. When you buy a new SD card, simply download A1 SD Bench and run it after you’ve popped your SD card into your device. A1 SD Bench will scan your SD card to let you know if it’s up to scratch or not. This is a very simple app but the interface can look a little messy and outdated however, once you get used to it, you’ll find it very useful in terms of pinpointing memory reserves on your SD card.
Vellamo Mobile
Vellamo Mobile is another very versatile benchmark app for android that’s free too. This app is simple and had a great user interface. Most importantly, it provides you with deep insights into your android device’s benchmarks. You can run six different benchmark tools to determine the rank of your CPU, GPU, RAM, etc. There’s a ton of different information provided by each tool so you can see what is happening under the hood of your device.
GPU Benchmark 3D
GPU Benchmark 3D is another best benchmark app for Android that focuses on gaming performance benchmarks. This app was designed from Unity Engine which is a graphical engine that is popular in the mobile gaming scene. This app will show you graphical benchmarks and it also runs rendered scenes so you’ll have the best mobile gaming experience.
GFXBench
This app is for those who want to test the Open GL capabilities of their Android devices. This app runs some GPU-intensive tests on your device using advanced API features so it may look a little complicated at first for new users. The test itself involves several intensive programs which determine the capabilities of your Android device. You may be limited by which device you run it on though as it is built mainly for Open Gl.
PCMark for Android Benchmark
PC Mark lets you benchmark your Android phone’s performance and battery life with tests based on everyday tasks. Once you install the app, you can download and run either Work 3.0 and Storage 2.0 benchmarks. The Work 3.0 benchmark includes performance and battery life tests. It runs common tasks like web browsing, editing videos, and working with documents and data. The battery test analyses your battery performance while stressing the device till it drops to below 20%. On the other hand, the Storage 2.0 benchmark measures the performance of your device’s storage. This includes the read and write speeds for internal and external storage and database performance.
AndroBench Storage Benchmark
AndroBench is a benchmark app that measures the storage performance of your Android phone. It provides two kinds of benchmarks- Micro and SQLite. Micro benchmark lets you compare the base performance of your storage (sequential read & write and random read & write) with other devices. Whereas SQLite benchmark tests the performance of insert, update, and delete queries on a database that mimics the one used in a messaging app. Alternatively, you can use the A1SDBench app to benchmark the device’s RAM, internal storage, and SD card.
