Ironically, Heer found that one of the ways to limit this excessive use of battery life on your iPhone is actually to turn on Background App Refresh for the Facebook app.
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Facebook today acknowledged its awareness of an issue raised by a few iOS users last week, who saw large amounts of battery drain on their iPhones while the social networking app ran in the background, even with background app refresh toggled off. Speaking with TechCrunch, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the company’s awareness of the bug and promised a fix would be in place “soon”.
However, iPhone users still complain about a massive battery drop, which is believed to be caused by the Facebook app.
“That extraneous background usage, despite not providing any value to me at all, is keeping the app alive 2x longer than my actual usage”, Gilligan wrote.
You can see which apps on your iPhone are allowed to run in the background by going to Settings General Background App Refresh.
The story Facebook app is draining iPhone batteries, say users first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.
Whatever the case, the app is reportedly draining an average of 7 percent of battery power on most phones over a 24 hour period. I don’t use push notifications and Facebook still registers more background activity than it does screen time.
Another possibility is that the Facebook app sends out silent audio signal to stay open in the background.
Violating Apple’s rules is grounds for an app to be removed from the App Store.
Those affected by the issue might resolve to delete the Facebook app for now, but help is at hand in the near future.
Apple declined Motherboard’s request to comment on the record.
Facebook’s constant refreshing, which keeps users up to date with their latest notifications, does indeed take a toll on battery life. We’ll definitely let you know when Facebook offers a fix – more than likely with an app update.
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Another alternative is to log on to Facebook via the mobile web.
