There are many tips and tricks to save battery on iPhone, and recently we learned that you should stop quitting apps in iOS. But apart from that, if there’s one app that that’s a real battery hog, it’s the Facebook app that we all love to use on our iOS devices.
This hard-to-believe fact is revealed by Scotty Loveless, an ex-Apple Genius. He has tried to identify several reasons the iPhone battery drains faster, and this Facebook app for iOS is one such reason.
In the blog post, he says:
I decided to run the app Instruments from Xcode, Apple’s developer tool, in order to see what the problem was. Basically, Instruments acts as an Activity Monitor for your iPhone, allowing developers (or nerds like me) to see every process currently running and how much memory and processing power each app is using in real-time.
During this testing, Facebook kept jumping up on the process list even though I wasn’t using it. So I tried disabling Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook, and you’ll never guess what happened: my battery percentage increased. It jumped from 12% to 17%. Crazy. I’ve never seen that happen before on an iPhone.
As we can see from this, there is a way to stop the Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) app’s behavior. For this, you’ll need to disable Location Services and also Background App Refresh. To disable Location Services go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services and toggle it to OFF. To disable Background App Refresh, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh on your iOS device.
Yet another way is to remove the Facebook app from your device, and instead visit Facebook.com from a browser like Safari or Chrome.
Recently it was reported that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) will be stripping out chatting functionality from its main app, which kind of seems to be a desperate move to push users towards its Messenger. Lately there’s lot happening over at Facebook, and we just hope that the social network doesn’t become too annoying over time. Forcing users to use Messenger for chatting is a bad idea by Facebook, and now this battery drain issue on iPhone is an indication that the social network needs to mend its ways, or else it won’t be long until the app starts receiving bad reviews on the App Store.
