Background Data and Battery Usage of Facebook’s iOS App | Hacker News Reader

Background Data and Battery Usage of Facebook’s iOS App

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54 pointshappyscrappy21 comments

I totally agree with this. I have been doing tests with Facebook's iOS app installed/uninstalled for month and without FB app, the battery is in much more better state during the day. I haven't done some crazy analysis, but noticed that removing the FB app increase my battery life for rough ~30%. I only use Safari to access the FB and I'm super happy about that. I spent less time on FB and have more battery. I highly recommend this approach to all my friends complaining about battery

I did notice recently that if you launch Facebook and put your ear to the bottom of your iPhone you can hear that the audio is on (white noise like when turning volume way up on a stereo that isn't playing.

Just now I confirmed that's happening and then home-screened to bail out, and after a second or two the white noise stops. Seems like it should be pretty easy to do similar experiments aimed at proving the OP's hypothesis.

[Edit: I tried the same experiment after playing videos, etc. Speaker still sounds like it loses power after bouncing back to the home screen... so while there might be games being played with regard to the app's activity and battery usage... I'm not really compelled by the specific hypothesis put forth in this article as to how]

[Edit: Of course, still begs the question "Why is the speaker getting power at all?". I haven't found other apps that appear to do this.]

I think you will find many a device with this. I recall my Nokia N800 had a sharp snap after having played any kind of sound in a quiet environment.

Last week my SO was freaking out because she kept getting ads for things she had conversations about in person, but never looked up on her phone. A few days ago I asked her why we had a plastic bag from Games Workshop (we've never shopped there and the bag came from a Craigslist purchase we had made). Her phone was sitting on the table, and a few hours later she showed me an ad for Games Workshop on her news feed. This was on Android, and the Messenger app includes permission to use the mic at any time.

It might be audio being always on, or it might be more than that. They aren't above it.

Ever checked the T and Cs to see if they are capturing audio?

I have had issues with playing music via Bluetooth (essentially the volume being too low) and research brought me to the Facebook app being open and closing it fixed it. Facebook is definitely doing funky stuff with audio that it should not be doing.

I removed the Facebook Android app because everytime I opened it it used 1MB of data.

Try Facebook Lite. It's designed for low powered phones.

And on Android use Tinfoil. It's FB for those of us who just look at it occasionally and don't want it tied into everything we do on the device.

I tried installing Facebook Lite in the Google Play store but it says "This item isn't available in your country". I live in the US.

They intend for it to only be used in countries with slower internet. You can download the apk from http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/ and it will work.

I had to remove the Facebook messenger app because it makes my Android phone swap. It's an old one with only 1GB RAM, but still...

I use App Quarantine to open/lock it down when done.

I've had to do the same thing for my iOS enterprise app. The issue is that you can't play audio if you're app is in the background and you haven't used your audio session in the past 1-2 minutes.

The workaround is to play a silent audio mp3 to prevent the app's audio session from being suspended.

The proper fix would be for apps to be allowed to start audio from the background

Facebook pushes an update to their iOS app once every two weeks (I think). I wonder how much review scrutiny it really gets.

Anyone with experience on an iOS app like that have insight into what the App Store review process looks like when you're that big and ship that often?

App Store review can only do minimum security level check in reality. And actually there's not much they can do either. Let me give you 3 examples:

1) Hybrid apps that most contents are actually webpage, such as the tripadvisor app and at&t app at some point (not sure if it's still hybrid today)

2) Games. You can load new code as static files or contents, then the app parse and execute the code as a new update. This is quite common in mobile games. As games require frequent update like once or more per week, it's really an unwanted workaround to fulfill the update frequency requirement.

3) Do you remember/know the case recently that some hacker released a "poisoned" version of xcode and apps written by that xcode "automatically" contains code sending user info to that hacker?

I disabled video autoplay to see if that helps.

It also appears that the Youtube app spends a significant amount of time in background so FB may not be the only one doing something shady.

Wonder how long before we get some stern words from Google about Facebook abusing priority messages to circumvent Doze.

Facebook doing something user-hostile? Say it ain't so!

This is the same kind of deceptive thing as VW.

I'm not saying this to start a war, but I don't use an iPhone. I use an Android phone. I have found the Facebook Lite app on Android to use virtually no battery when idle. I know that this app was pretty much designed for low power phones. It's odd that on the one hand, they are thinking about low powered phones and using less data while on the other hand, as with iOS, they aren't.

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