If you are an iPhone user, the Facebook app could be eating up your battery. Facebook is such a big part of our lives these days. We use it to catch up with friends and relatives. We use it for just about everything. Today Facebook engineers admit they are looking into an issue with the battery usage.

Battery life is always an issue whether it is an iPhone, Android, or the Space Station – everything needs power and power never lasts. Since the release of iOS 8, you can check to see what app is using your battery. It is even easier to find in iOS 9. If you are concerned there are a few things you should check. First go into settings, and then tap Battery. It will show you app by app to what is using your battery. You can change from the last 24 hours to the last 7 day. You can also use the Tips app to learn more about battery life issues.

On my phone it shows that Facebook has been used 21 min on the screen and 11.3 hours in the background. This is the crux of the issue. Ari Grant, Facebook's Engineering Manager, said this issue is traced back a "CPU spin" and the audio player. This is how Grant described this issue:

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.

 

The second issue is with how we manage audio sessions. If you leave the Facebook app after watching a video, the audio session sometimes stays open as if the app was playing audio silently. This is similar to when you close a music app and want to keep listening to the music while you do other things, except in this case it was unintentional and nothing kept playing.

In fact Facebook has just released an update today. The update notes do not mention the battery issue whereas the post did. It is always recommended to update your phone as soon as possible. I'd like to add to always make sure you have a backup for large updates. So update Facebook on your phone, and make sure to keep an eye on the battery life setting from time to time.

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