PSA: The iOS Facebook app is killing your battery life
PSA: The iOS Facebook app is killing your battery life
Have you been experiencing shorter than expected battery life on your new iPhone? It looks like Facebook's iOS app could be to blame. A number of users are reporting that the Facebook app is continuing to run processes in the background — even with background app refresh disabled.
Earlier this week, Matt Galligan first posted evidence on Medium showing the Facebook app accounting for the majority of his iPhone's battery drain by running in the background, even after Galligan had explicitly turned off Facebook's permission to run in the background from his Settings app.
"Over the last 7 days, Facebook is the greatest offender of battery drain on my iPhone 6s Plus," Galligan wrote, noting that the app "accounted for 15% of all battery drain."
You can check which apps are allowed to run in the background of your iPhone by going to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. Apple has this setting in place to prevent apps from violating your privacy and draining your battery when you're not using them.
Facebook however seems to have circumvented this setting. According to multiple users on Reddit, Facebook is able to do this by "abusing" a provision Apple allows for Voice-over-IP (VoIP) apps like Skype to always run in the background so they can do their jobs, like let you answer incoming calls even when an app isn't open. Of course, Facebook has no such VoIP functionality, so this would be a blatant violation of Apple's terms.
According to Techcrunch, Facebook is now investigating the matter. "We have heard reports of some people experiencing battery issues with our iOS app. We’re looking into this and hope to have a fix in place soon,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
For now however, if you want to stop Facebook from killing your battery life, the only thing you can do is delete the app entirely and and log into Facebook via your mobile Internet browser.
Source: Matt Galligan Medium, Reddit & TechCrunch