
Background Data and Battery Usage of Facebook’s iOS App - happyscrappy
https://www.macstories.net/linked/the-background-data-and-battery-usage-of-facebooks-ios-app/
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tomashertus
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

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famousactress
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.]

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digi_owl
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.

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mccoolman
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.

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

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istvanp
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.

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

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

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Abundnce10
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.

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glomph
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/](http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/)
and it will work.

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mcCuppaT
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

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ejdyksen
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?

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tomtang0514
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?

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newman314
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.

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

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

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steen_anderson
This is the same kind of deceptive thing as VW.

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JustSomeNobody
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.

