Facebook has released a update for its iOS app which addresses the recently-reported battery drain issue. While the release note of the app doesn't specify such changes, the company's engineering manager has confirmed that the company has indeed patched some bugs that ate up battery on iOS devices.
Earlier this month, many users reported that Facebook app on their iPhone was mysteriously consuming a lot of battery life. The company had acknowledged the issue at the time and assured that it is looking into it. Ari Grant, Engineering Manager at Facebook now said that the new update fixes many of the bugs causing the issue. If chatter on Twitter is to be believed, the update does seem to help lower battery consumption.
Grant said that the update also fixes a bug that caused a silent audio stream to run in the background when a user switched to the other app. This as you would realise, also consumed a significant amount of battery life.
"The first issue we found was a "CPU spin" in our network code. 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. This repeated processing causes our app to use more battery than intended. The version released today has some improvements that should start making this better," Grant said in a post on his Facebook profile.
Last week it was reported that constant location tracking, on by default, was the bottleneck that was causing the battery drainage. Grant has dismissed all such theories. He noted that location features (mostly optional Location History) have nothing to do with the bugs that caused the battery drainage.
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