My battery is occasionally out by lunchtime, and it’s really annoying. So I set out to find out what is the cause.
I cam across an interesting article in CultofMac.com which explains that Facebook might be the cause. If you are using an iPhone with Location Services and Background App Refresh enabled, then it is likely to be the biggest battery drain your iPhone is facing.
This article references an ex Apple Genius Bar employee’s thoughts on the subject
“I decided to run the app Instruments from Xcode, Apple’s developer tool, in order to see what the problem was. Basically, Instruments acts as an Activity Monitor for your iPhone, allowing developers (or nerds like me) to see every process currently running and how much memory and processing power each app is using in real-time.
“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 percent to 17 percent. Crazy. I’ve never seen that happen before on an iPhone.”
So the question remains…why is Facebook draining your battery life? Does Facebook want to run its own VoIP network? It’s quite believable that Facebook would wants to expand beyond a social network, to become a worldwide communication network.
Is this why it bought WhatsApp?
For more on this, check out this article in Computer World: http://blogs.computerworld.com/mobile-apps/23757/why-facebook-killing-iphone-battery-life
Check out this video from Everything Apple Pro to see what else you can be doing to get the best battery life out of your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad: