Deleting the Facebook app from your smartphone, whether it’s an Android or iPhone, could significantly improve your device’s battery life. The company released an update that claimed to fix most of the bug, but it appears the battery draining problem still hasn’t been squashed.
Advertisement
Similar concerns about Facebook’s Android app led to the discovery that deleting the app saved up to 20% of a phone’s battery. For £79, the case provides 18 additional hours of battery life on the iPhone 6s while using 4G internet. I accessed Facebook for the same amount of time, and for the same purposes, using the social network’s excellent mobile site within Safari, as I had done using the app. I also left the Facebook Messenger app installed. The Guardian has some anecdotal evidence indicating that it’s not just using Facebook that’s running your battery down-it’s using the Facebook iOS app specifically. According to him, an alternative way of accessing Facebook can be through the Safari browser, giving fed up iOS users a way to save their phone batteries and still access their social media accounts through their smartphones.
Gibbs also recruited other iPhone users to test out his system and says they all found their battery life increased by uninstalling the Facebook iOS app.
“At the point I had deleted the Facebook app it had consumed around 500MB in total combining the 111MB of the app itself and its cache on the iPhone”, he explains.
Best of all, Facebook’s mobile site lets you do nearly everything you can do through its mobile app, although some features such as Instant Articles aren’t available.
Advertisement
It’s not totally clear why the Facebook app is such an energy hog.
