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Facebook this morning came under fire once more over concerns regarding the impact its iOS app has on iPhone battery life.

Writing in The Guardian, technology reporter Samuel Gibbs claims to have found that uninstalling Facebook's iOS app and accessing the social media site via Safari can save up to 15 percent of an iPhone's battery life.

Gibbs relates how he uninstalled the app on his iPhone 6s Plus and recorded its battery life at the same time each day for a week, comparing the numbers to a daily average taken from a week with the app installed.

The writer accessed Facebook's site through Safari for the same amount of time and for the same purposes as he had using the dedicated app. Gibbs also notes that he left Facebook's Messenger app installed throughout.

smart-battery-case-white-800x547.jpg

In conclusion, Gibbs states that his iPhone had on average 15 percent more battery life by 10:30 p.m. each day without the social media app installed. He also notes large gains in free space, since the deleted app had consumed 500MB in total of his iPhone's capacity. Gibbs chalks most of that up to Facebook's cache, owing to the fact that the app itself is only a 111MB download.

Several other users of the app were recruited to carry out further tests and corroborated Gibbs' energy-saving results without the app installed. A Facebook spokesperson said the company is investigating the matter.

Facebook is no stranger to concerns regarding the impact of its iOS apps on battery life. In October the company released an update to fix issues raised by users who saw large amounts of battery drain on their iPhones while the social networking app ran in the background, even with the background app refresh toggled off.

With the release of the update, Facebook said the problem was due to a recurring background audio issue, prompting claims from some tech bloggers that the "issue" was an intentional ploy by developers to keep the app active in the background and discreetly pre-load content.

Article Link: Facebook iOS App Under Fire Again for iPhone Battery Drain Issues
 

vmistery

macrumors 6502a
Apr 6, 2010
941
687
UK
Just checked in the battery app. 7% of battery for 10 minutes on screen and 49 mins background. Not good value and I'm one who always nearly runs out each day.
 

2457282

Suspended
Dec 6, 2012
3,327
3,015
Deleted that junk app long time ago and never looked back or missed it - no need/use for that rubbish on my phone.
Totally agree. Now I can focus on real social interactions instead of social media interaction. I still have a Facebook page, but have not posted to it in over two years.
 
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JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,082
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Web version sufficient. No need to have an app.

I wouldn't be surprised though if Facebook somehow made it so you HAD to use the app on a phone. Anyone know why they couldn't do that?
 
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TonyC28

macrumors 68030
Aug 15, 2009
2,756
6,934
USA
Would it be safe to assume at this point that they know the battery is going to be affected but they just don't care and keep as much background crap running as possible?

I would love to see an option in iOS to disallow all background activity on a per app basis. Basically when I click the home button in an app it closes completely and doesn't stay in the app switcher. That would be a perfect solution to Facebook. Instead now I have to close the app and then go into the app switcher to really close it.
 
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kevo0822

macrumors 6502
Jul 13, 2007
339
97
New England
Maybe this has something to do with the Facebook app continuously playing static over the speaker (at low volume). After you scroll past a video for the first time after opening an app (don't even have to click it and watch it... just scroll past it), you can hear a small amount of static continuously playing from the phone's speaker!

It happens on my phone and my friend's phone... so I assume it's not just us.
 

ArtOfWarfare

macrumors G3
Nov 26, 2007
9,541
6,028
I wouldn't be surprised though if Facebook somehow made it so you HAD to use the app on a phone. Anyone know why they couldn't do that?

They could take stop having a website at all. That would force you to use the app. But given a lot of people still use the website (mostly from their computers), that seems like a very poor choice to me.

They could try making it so their website won't render on mobile, but I imagine that so long as they have a website that works on desktop browsers, developers will be able to create mobile browsers that can pretend they're desktop browsers.
 

LordQ

Suspended
Sep 22, 2012
3,582
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Three years without that cancer. WhatsApp's "background activity" also drains the battery a lot!

Please, Tim, iMessage for Android so I can ditch WhatsApp too!
 

Sea Bass

macrumors regular
Sep 17, 2015
102
40
The Facebook app is also a huge storage hog, taking up over 500 MBs of storage. I don't need other people's pictures/videos being cached by Facebook and taking up room on my phone.
 
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OldSchoolMacGuy

Suspended
Jul 10, 2008
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Apps are always going to take more battery than browser because the browser is much more limiting in what it can do. This shouldn't be a surprise.

It should be noted that while the browser takes less battery, it also uses more data, as it's not compressed in the same ways as the app optimizes.
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The Facebook app is also a huge storage hog, taking up over 500 MBs of storage. I don't need other people's pictures/videos being cached by Facebook and taking up room on my phone.

You'd rather have it eat up extra data by downloading those elements every time and less battery life thanks to the extra need for additional downloading? 500MB is nothing on most phones and shouldn't be an issue.
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They could take stop having a website at all. That would force you to use the app. But given a lot of people still use the website (mostly from their computers), that seems like a very poor choice to me.

They could try making it so their website won't render on mobile, but I imagine that so long as they have a website that works on desktop browsers, developers will be able to create mobile browsers that can pretend they're desktop browsers.

They'll never do so. They want you to be able to access Facebook no matter what device you're on and no matter how you choose to access it. Their entire existence depends on it. They can't show you ads if you don't go to the social network. Blocking people from accessing it one way or another would mean a drop in revenue and be silly.
 
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