Facebook fixes iPhone battery drain issue

facebook battery drain
Facebook says it fixed two key issues that caused its iPhone app to drain battery life.

Facebook has admitted that its app drains your iPhone's battery life, so it released a new version on Thursday that should solve the problem.

The update of the Facebook iOS app includes two key fixes, the company says.

The first corrects a background audio issue. The second addresses a piece of code that caused a phone's processor to work harder than it had to.

Previously, if you watched a video on the app and switched to another app to do something else, the audio component of the video sometimes continued to run.

Music apps typically work like this, so that you can listen to music in the background while multitasking. But in this case, nothing actually plays. The app just stayed awake, using up power.

"Our fixes will solve this audio issue and remove background audio completely," Ari Grant, a Facebook mobile engineer, said in a post.

The other problem had to do with code that caused the app to continuously ping Facebook's main network.

"A CPU spin is like a child in a car asking, 'Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?' with the question not resulting in any progress to reaching the destination," Grant explained. "This repeated processing causes our app to use more battery than intended. The version released [Thursday] has some improvements that should start making this better."

Facebook (FB) says it made both changes in response to a bevy of complaints that began shortly after Apple (AAPL) launched iOS 9.

The latest mobile operating system features a new "battery" setting that tracks how much power apps are using. Many people noticed that Facebook was often the worst offender.

Some thought the issue was due to location tracking, but Grant said that wasn't the problem at all.

Along with the explanations, Grant also apologized for "any inconvenience this has caused."

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