If you own a smartphone running iOS 9, Apple’s new power-saving feature could give you way more battery life than you might expect – provided you know how to use it.
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One Reddit user said they had used the Facebook app for 40 minutes, but clocked up background activity worth more than two hours, “costing me nearly a 20 per cent hit to the battery”, despite location services and background app refresh being switched off.
Facebook has confirmed that it is now investigating claims that its iOS app is causing a significant amount of battery drain.
“Over the last 7 days, Facebook is the greatest offender of battery drain on my iPhone 6s Plus”, Galligan wrote, noting that the app “accounted for 15% of all battery drain”. “This is a pretty blatant abuse of iOS, and it’s no surprise the batteries are draining”.
Other people who have shared their theories on the issue and suggested fixes include MacStories’ Federico Viticci, who thinks that the problem is Facebook “hijacking audio sessions on iOS by keeping silent audio in the background whenever a video plays in the app”.
While critics have slammed Facebook for failing to address the issue – one tech blogger called it “user-hostile” – it’s unclear whether Facebook is doing this intentionally and if so, what the reason behind it is. “We’re looking into it and hope to have a fix in place soon”.
Facebook’s constant refreshing, which keeps users up to date with their latest notifications, does indeed take a toll on battery life. The company is tight-lipped about the issue here, only stating that it will be out with the fix soon, so we can’t yet say if this was just a bug or an annoying background feature gone rogue.
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Besides the mobile version of Facebook’s website, iPhone owners do have another option with Paper, an experimental app from Facebook that uses less battery life.
