Facebook says bad app coding caused iOS battery drain, not location settings
Many iPhone users were upset to find that battery life was rather shorter than expected. Fingers of suspicion started to point to the iOS Facebook app, and now the social network has released a fix as well as revealing that poor coding was to blame.
The latest version of the Facebook app goes some way to putting things right, but it is unlikely to be a complete fix. Facebook says it "found a few key issues and have identified additional improvements" in the app, but only "some of which" made it into the latest update. Something the company is keen to stress is that the Location History feature is not responsible, and provides details about two other factors contributing to battery drain.
One of the problems stems from the fact that the app failed to close audio sessions when they finished. This means that iPhones ate through battery life "as if the app was playing audio silently". Ari Grant from Facebook says:
The app isn't actually doing anything while awake in the background, but it does use more battery simply by being awake. Our fixes will solve this audio issue and remove background audio completely.
Another issue relates to CPU spin in network code. The app was using too much processing time -- and therefore battery -- by checking too frequently whether operations had completed. But even with an updated version of the app, Facebook has not managed to fully nail the problem: there are just "some improvements that should start making this better".
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