Is Facebook Draining Your Phone’s Battery Life?

Disabling the Facebook iOS app can save up to 15% of an iPhone’s battery life, according to The Guardian technology reporter Samuel Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs reached this conclusion after he chose to delete his Facebook iOS app from the iPhone 6s and recorded battery levels for the next week, which revealed a positive effect on the iPhone’s battery life.

The writer accessed Facebook’s site through Safari for the same amount of time and for the same purposes as he had using the dedicated app. Gibbs also notes that he left Facebook’s Messenger app installed throughout. After a week of using the phone without the Facebook iOS app installed, he discovered that his battery performance was on average 15% better and he had a lot more storage on his device as well. Users will not have to forgo using the Facebook app, as they can opt to use it on Safari.

“We found a few key issues and have identified additional improvements, some of which are in the version of the app that was released today”, wrote Facebook’s Ari Grant, adding: “We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused”.

Though you’ll get most of the Facebook app’s features through the mobile website, some – like notifications – are only available by using the app.

Previous year software experts confronted the social media giant over the way its mobile app runs processes in the background which can use up a smartphone’s battery life.

If you’re an iPhone-owning Facebook user who never seems to have enough battery life, there’s now more reason to believe the Facebook app could be part of the problem. Gibbs found that deleting the app saved 500MB of space due to all the cached data used by the app.