Facebook releases update to address battery drain issue for its iOS app
23 Oct 2015
Facebook has released an update for its iOS app to address the battery drain issue, which had been reported recently.
While no mention is made to such changes in the app's release note, the company's engineering manager confirmed that the company had indeed patched a number of bugs that shortened battery life on iOS devices.
Earlier this month, many users reported that the Facebook app on their iPhone was mysteriously eating up battery life.
Acknowledging the issue at the time Facebook said that it was looking into it.
According to Ari Grant, engineering manager at Facebook, the new update fixed many of the bugs causing the issue.
According to posts on Twitter, the update did seem to help lower battery consumption.
He added, the update also fixed a bug that caused a silent audio stream to run in the background when a user switched to the other app which also consumed a significant amount of battery life.
"The first issue we found was a "CPU spin" in our network code. A CPU spin is like a child in a car asking, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" with the question not resulting in any progress to reaching the destination. This repeated processing causes our app to use more battery than intended. The version released today has some improvements that should start making this better," Grant said in a post on his Facebook profile.
"If you leave the Facebook app after watching a video, the audio session sometimes stays open as if the app was playing audio silently," Grant wrote.
"The app isn't actually doing anything while awake in the background, but it does use more battery simply by being awake."
According to commentators, the background activity was like what a radio streaming app would register while users were listening to audio, but not spending active screen time in the app.
"We are committed to continuing to improve the battery usage of our app and you should see improvements in the version released today," Grant said.
Stream video on your smartphone, or use its GPS for an hour or two, and you'll probably see the battery drain significantly.
As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features, battery life has become a concern.
