Facebook App, Background and Battery

[numberfour]

I've deleted the Facebook app for the first time in many years. Replaced it with a safari shortcut

 

[masands]

Yup, deleted my Facebook app too. After 12hrs sitting on my desk with little/no use, my iPhone 5 battery is at 85%. With the FB app it would be around 60%.

 

[Sleaka J]

i deleted their stupid app a while ago and replaced it with the mobile site on my home screen. another advantage is that the mobile site stays at "most recent" where the app always reverted back to that utterly useless "top news" crap

Oh, I so totally did this for that EXACT reason.

 

[DJLAXL]

Just deleted the app and will try the mobile site myself. I wondered why I saw the background activity also.

 

[ericgedi77]

I've deleted the Facebook app for the first time in many years. Replaced it with a safari shortcut

I did the same thing. I'm also using facebook paper for notifications and messages.

 

[TL24]

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed this... I've been checking my battery usage since buying the 6S Plus and noticed that FB is using 50% of it with 5.5+ hours of background activity! It never did that before on the previous FB app version so I'm thinking it's a bug on FB's end.

 

[penajmz]

Just deleted the app too. Not worth it.

 

[TonyC28]

Because of the Facebook app more than any other we should have an option to completely close an app when the home button is pushed. I understand why it's convenient for certain apps to be left in the multitasking switcher but Facebook is Exhibit A for why this could be a problem. So it's really simple: just give us the option to kill "multitasking" on the apps we choose.

 

[soccerjoshj07]

Yup, deleted my Facebook app too. After 12hrs sitting on my desk with little/no use, my iPhone 5 battery is at 85%. With the FB app it would be around 60%.

Wow nice! Anyone else have #'s after deleting the app?

 

[C DM]

Odd. I've pretty much always had Facebook installed and use it here and there throughout the day, but it never comes up with much usage in my battery stats (neither by percentage, nor by actual usage, nor by background usage). Same goes for another device at home that has Facebook and gets used fairly regularly.

 

[Radon87000]

Facebook app is crap both on my iPhone and Android as well.I only use their mobile site by pinning it to the home screen

 

[TL24]

It's the latest version of FB (v. 40.0) that is causing the issue, if I recall correctly it was released yesterday (28th) and my battery life has been horrible since then.

I have since deleted the app and I'm currently sitting at 55% with 6 hrs of usage and 9 hrs of standby. Pretty damn good if you ask me.

 

[Trahearne]

After watching the WWDC session video again (2015 What's New in Notifications session), they also say that silent "content-available" notifications are available to apps by default, even without the user giving the app permission to use notifications. However, background app refresh is supposed to disable delivery of them (according to the session, silent notifications are the mechanism behind background app refresh).

So I believe this is unintended behaviour, a bug which is allowing the app to receive "content-available" notifications (which you can receive even without giving an app permission to use notifications - that's by design according to the session video), even if background app refresh is off.

The session video isn't clear on whether granting permission to notifications and then turning them off also prevents silent notifications, but if it does that would explain why turning them off after having them enabled fixed it for me. The session seems to suggest the user facing notifications settings don't have any impact on silent "content-available" notifications and that they're controlled strictly by background app refresh.

The behaviour of the remote background mode are pretty deterministic, and I don't think it would be the cause. As a side note, the snippets you quoted just means that the services can *send* silent "content-available" notifications to your devices via APNs without permission explicitly granted. Yet the app wouldn't receive those notifications if BAR is off. Why? It is because the OS is the one who handles remote notifications, and who holds the final decision to call the app's fetch routine.

There is still one notification-triggered background mode that wouldn't block by the BAR setting: VoIP. *speculation alert* It is possible that Apple might have somehow let big players in the App Store use this background mode for things other than VoIP. For example, WhatsApp Web has a high chance of being implemented this way, if WhatsApp did not actually rework the architecture of WhatsApp Web.