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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Reports of the battery drain began cropping up earlier this week, with one user, entrepreneur Matt Gilligan, explaining in a blog post that Facebook’s iOS app was causing up to 15% of battery drain over a 7 day period.
Multiple theories have since been floated online as to why this is happening but so far Facebook isn’t commenting on them, it’s keep its head down and looking into the matter, without addressing why its iOS app is causing so much background activity that users have started to complain about battery drain.
“Despite having background app refresh disabled, because the app isn’t “sleeping” properly when I hit the home button, it continues to drain”, writes Galligan.
You can see which apps on your iPhone are allowed to run in the background by going to Settings General Background App Refresh. Ironically, the best way to reduce the battery and data consumption of the Facebook app in the background is to switch Background App Refresh back on. “This is a pretty blatant abuse of iOS, and it’s no surprise the batteries are draining”.
“Multitasking Apps may only use background services for their intended purposes: VoIP, audio playback, location, task completion, local notifications, etc”.
Those affected by the issue might resolve to delete the Facebook app for now, but help is at hand in the near future.
Others have suggested push notifications are draining power, but that’s doubtful.
“We have heard reports of a few people experiencing battery issues with our iOS app”, the social media giant said in a statement to TechCrunch.
As for what users can do right now, at the moment it comes down to waiting for a fix from Facebook.
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Another alternative is to log on to Facebook via the mobile web.
