iPhone users with bad battery life have a new way to conserve their phone’s power: deleting the Facebook app. According to The Guardian, uninstalling the social media app can save battery life by up to 15 percent. Users will not have to forgo using the Facebook app, as they can opt to use it on Safari.
The report from The Guardian relies on experimentation on the part of the reporter, who recorded battery life every night while keeping other variables (e.g. Facebook browsing time, charging time) constant.
“On average I had 15% more battery left by 10.30pm each day,” wrote Samuel Gibbs. “I had also saved space, because at the point I had deleted the Facebook app it had consumed around 500MB in total combining the 111MB of the app itself and its cache on the iPhone.”
Gibbs also recruited other iPhone users to test out his system and says they all found their battery life increased by uninstalling the Facebook iOS app.
For users concerned about how convenient it is to browse Facebook on Safari, Gibbs claims “using Facebook in Safari was almost as good as the app.” He notes that certain features like Instant Articles are not available.
“You can even place a shortcut to Facebook in Safari on the homescreen that looks almost identical to the app’s icon (the white is a little less bright but you need eagle eyes to see),” wrote Gibbs. “The only restriction was the Share-to function, which does not exist for websites, meaning that to share photos I had to manually hit the “post photos” button on the mobile site.”
Last year, Facebook acknowledged that its iOS app was draining batteries faster. The two issues that were identified (and resolves) were a “CPU spin” in the network and how they managed audio sessions.
"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. We are committed to continuing to improve the battery usage of our app and you should see improvements in the version released today.”
