Could the Facebook app be killing your battery?

We recently did a piece on iPhone battery saving tips, but it looks like we need to add another one to the list. Evidence has been found that Facebook’s iOS app may be a suspect in shortening battery life. The web site overthought.com, run by Scotty Loveless, has its own battery saving tips which adds Facebook’s app as a culprit. Being an ex-Apple Genius gave Scotty some extra insight into his own iPhone’s battery drain. Fueled by evidence collected over the years in the support field, and recent finger-pointing to the iOS 7.1 update as the cause for many users’ battery woes, he set out to pinpoint the most likely, and serious, battery draining problems.

He describes his frustration originating from this;

“iOS 7.1 came out recently and brought with it a bevy of design tweaks and performance enhancements. However, some users are reporting poor battery life since the update, and many blogs are reporting it as fact. This is not one of those “Turn off every useful feature of iOS” posts that grinds my gears. My goal is to deliver practical steps to truly solve your iOS battery woes.”

After experiencing shorter than normal battery life on a new iPhone 5S, and armed with a knowledge of Xcode (Apple’s developer software), he got some unexpected results;

“During this testing, Facebook kept jumping up on the process list even though I wasn’t using it. So I tried disabling Location Services  and Background App Refresh  for Facebook, and you’ll never guess what happened: my battery percentage increased. It jumped from 12% to 17%. Crazy. I’ve never seen that happen before on an iPhone.”

The rest of the article is a really good read. I was really surprised by some of the results Loveless found, and by some of the information he provided with his tips which I had either never heard before, or had heard the exact opposite. Here are the titles of a couple of other tips he provides;

• Stop Quitting Your Apps in Multitasking
• Disable Push Email Temporarily
• Turn Off Battery Percentage

If you are experiencing short battery life, or just want to eek out a few more precious minutes of power, I highly recommend you go read the article. I’ll miss the battery percent reading, but if it makes a difference it’ll be worth it.