Phone battery draining too quickly? Facebook could be to blame

IT’S easily one of the most frustrating first-world problems out there.

You fully charge your phone battery before leaving the house, only to have it drop to 50 per cent just a couple of hours later. Even though its makers went on and on about their fancy new battery in that convincing Helvetica font.

Some suggest it’s an elaborate Apple conspiracy to force us to buy a new phone every year. Others say “smartphones just suck” and that we should all go back to those old Nokia bricks and dial-up modems. Most of us just have a quick whinge, suck it up and move on.

But a very good potential reason behind your excessive battery drain has been unveiled, and if you’re a Facebook user, this affects you.

Facebook has admitted the social media network is responsible for people experiencing battery issues with their phones. The network’s engineering manager Ari Grant announced a few “key issues” had been found, including a “CPU spin” in Facebook’s network code and problems with how it manages audio sessions.

So how do you fix it? Facebook recommends you update to their newest version of the app as soon as possible. If you don’t have this automatically set up, you can do so manually via the App Store.

You can also track what apps are draining your battery the most by checking out the ‘battery’ section in your iPhone’s General settings.

Facebook came under scrutiny for similar reasons in April last year, when a former Apple expert discovered the Facebook app was continually requesting resources, hogging battery power as a result.

Here are some more tips for improving your smartphone’s battery life:

• Set your phone to low power mode. This Apple iOS 9 feature will temporarily reduce power consumption by either reducing or turning off a bunch of non-crucial features, like Siri and automatic downloads. It’s located in ‘battery’ under general settings.

• Tweak your phone’s brightness settings. The dimmer your backlight, the less battery life you’ll use. Turn off the auto-brightness option.

• Maximise your auto-lock time. Try to get used to manually using the sleep/wake button rather than having it lock automatically after 60 seconds.

• Put your phone on aeroplane mode when you’re not actively using it to make calls or use up data.

• Disable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and location services until you really need them.

• Stay away from fancy, special-effects wallpapers.

• Turn off vibrate unless you really need it.

• Minimise app notifications. Often we just allow push notifications, which keep these apps constantly running in the background.