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Facebook App May Be Draining iPhone, iPad Batteries

May 31, 2013

Facebook battery life on iPhone

By Paul Thomson :: 7:49 PM

Do you have the Facebook app installed on your iPhone or iPad? Have you noticed an issue with your battery life? A German researcher thinks that the social network’s mobile app may be to blame.

Sebastian Düvel, IT researcher and iOS developer, examined the way that the Facebook mobile application drains iOS device batteries. He set up an iOS developer diagnostic tool, Instruments, and measured how each application on his phone makes use of the device’s microprocessor. What he discovered was that while he isn’t a heavy user of the Facebook application, it still accounted for a large percentage of his processor use time.

Every few minutes, the Facebook application would run for about ten seconds – whether or not Düvel was using it at the time. This repeated use of processor resources by the app accounts for battery life issues, says Düvel.

Right now, the only way around the battery issue is to either uninstall the Facebook application, or to kill the app after every use.

To kill any application on an iPhone or iPad, you need to press the home button twice, and then press and hold any app along the bottom tray. Then, the applications should wiggle, and a minus sign will appear on the corner of their icons. Select the minus sigh next to the Facebook application to kill the app.