(Mirror Daily, United States) – Facebook has released an update for its native iOS app, and users wondered if it fixes the battery drain issue that has attracted so many complaints in the past week. But checking the App Store release notes didn’t reveal any details about what this update is really fixing.
Instead, Facebook has decided to stick with the generic message “To make our app better for you, we bring updates to the App Store every 2 weeks.” That’s… thoughtful. But it’s less than helpful if you’re trying to figure out whether the update is going to stop your phone from draining in the middle of the day.
Fortunately for all the iOS users, we’ve got Ari Grant, Engineering Manager at Facebook, to dish out the details of the update on his public Facebook page. Seeing from his latest post, this release indeed fixed the battery drain – at least partially.
The team has been looking into the causes that might cause the problems reported by some users related to Facebook iOS app causing battery issues. Two key problems have been identified, so the improvements should start being visible with today’s update of the app.
Firstly, a “CPU spin” was found in the social network’s code, which Ari explained it’s like that annoying kid in a car who keeps asking “Are we there yet?” even though the question is not going to make him reach the destination any faster.
Having this CPU spin on repeat is partly the reason why the Facebook app has been using more battery than normal. But there’s also the issue of audio sessions, which seemed to stay open even after users left the app. For example, if you would watch a video and then closed the app, sometimes the audio session would go on, as if it was playing audio silently, except it wasn’t.
At the same time, Ari denied any connection between the battery issues and the optional Location feature in the app – or anything related to location, for that matter. For the users who have opted out of the feature, Facebook promises it doesn’t access their device’s location in the background. Even so, you might want to keep switched off anyway.
So it wasn’t the infamous Location the one to cause the battery drainage, but two minor issues that caused the app to still run in the background, which isn’t surprising, considering that Facebook is still tweaking some of the newer features, such as the video/audio.
Image Source: OSX Daily
Matthew Slotkin
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