Facebook background activity

It was noticed months ago when people complained about it. A Facebook engineer admitted on a blog that the app was playing a soundless music file in the background in order to keep it running in the background.

If you have not updated your FB app in a while you may be catching some of that. If you have, they probably haven't completely fixed it yet.

 

Yep, Facebook is a know battery hog. Not even using it and it will still work in the background.

 

If you disable background activity for Facebook, it decreases background usage, but it still is ridiculous.

 

The only two real options to fix it until they actually fix their app is to.

1: Always fully close the app in the App Switcher after using the app.

2: Uninstall and use the webpage only.

I use method #1 and never get any background usage for Facebook.

 

I use method #2. FB isn't that important to me.

 

I've noticed that if you're using the FB app and click on a link to an article for example or click on a picture - basically anything that takes you off the regular news feed, then FB will remain open for a longer period of time versus if you are in the news feed section and just press the home button or switch to another app.

 

FB has been the devil as of late. Maybe a week ago it really started killing my battery, and I have since uninstalled it. I usually leave work (9 hour day) with 60% battery, in the last week it is around 25%

 

And remember that FB is tracking everything you are doing and capturing and selling that data - why it wants to run continually in background.

 

At least in iOS they are really not tracking everything, and for most of the things that they do have access there are user controls that can allow them them access to those things or not. While the background usage could be related to some of that, it's not really a given that that's really what its really about.

 

I didn't know anything about the soundless music file bug (if they're calling it that), but id start with making sure you're only receiving the notifications you want. I am a member of a handful of collector groups and Facebook was defaulting to alerting me whenever anyone responded to a thread I said anything in. As you can imagine, a busy thread would have me getting background notifications almost constantly.

 

I'm not stressing over it, because my overall battery life is fine, but I've done everything (always swipe close, turned of background app refresh, turned of notifications, using the latest version of the app) and Facebook's "background activity" is still the main power drainer on my phone and iPad. It's been a well known issue for months, and it simply hasn't been addressed.

 

Strange, I don't even usually close out Facebook after each use and have notifications enabled (although only for certain things that I selected) and while it's usually there in my battery usage, it's generally not one of the higher usage apps. Have you disabled video auto-play in Facebook and/or location services in iOS for Facebook?

 

Yes to disabling autoplay (it wastes data as well as battery if you're not on wifi), and I have location services set to either "never" or "while using" for just about all of my apps, but Facebook doesn't seem to be listed among my apps under location services.

*Edit*
Oh yes, I remember now, the location setting for FB are within the app itself. I have it set to "never".

*Edit 2*
I'm dumb, it is under location services in the general settings as well, but it's also set to "never" there. I obviously knew this and changed the settings at some point in the past and forgot.

 

Not Facebook specific, but iOS handling of background tasks is potentially very unreliable.

I've had multiple apps which have continued to report heavy background use in the battery settings and continue to rapidly drain the battery EVEN after killing the apps from the task switcher, and EVEN after further restarting the phone. The only way to stop the drain was to delete the app from the phone entirely.

And this has not been a 1-off occurrence. It's happened to me multiple times with different apps.

 

Very strange. Can't say I've ever come across that over the years with different apps that I use.

 

I couldn't believe it either. But I carefully watched as usage continued to climb rapidly after "killing" the app and even fresh booting. Background app refresh is off.

It is worth noting they were both 3rd party mapping apps. Perhaps it is a bug with gps getting stuck or something. Still troubling that it seemed to only stop with app deletion.

And my basic note was that killing from app switcher in at least some cases doesn't guarantee it's actually stopped running.