I’m no fan of Facebook, and this sort of thing just adds fuel to that particular fire.
Three things to read:
- Matt Gilligan’s essay, which we linked to yesterday. It’s called Battery life, load times, and actually giving a shit about your customers
-
Nick Heer’s PixelEnvy piece, which includes this comment:
Make no mistake: this is user-hostile. Facebook is actively creating channels to continue refreshing their app in the background when the user has explicitly stated that they do not want it to. Ironically, the best way to reduce the battery and data consumption of the Facebook app in the background is to switch Background App Refresh back on.
And:
- Federico Viticci’s excellent wrap-up piece for MacStories, where he brings all this together.
Ignore the user’s needs at your peril.
I switched to their Paper app, but I’m ready to ditch that, too. I’ve seen all the pictures of your dog/child/inspirational quotes/high scores/factoids that I care to see.
To companies like Google and Facebook we are the product, not the customer. I ditched the apps years ago, these stories confirm my choice is still the right one.
I’ve been force quitting Facebook and Messenger every time I’m finished with them for years (probably since iOS 6, though I can’t remember) precisely because of this behavior. On multiple occasions I’ve witnessed my battery drain 20% in an hour because I forgot to close Facebook.
A while ago I was having a whine about the size of the app,
A few of my more experienced developer friends, speaking of both iOS and android versions of the app suggested deleting it and using mobile web version if I really have to get on FB; missing all those BS notifications, gaining massive battery life.
After this I started deleting terrible apps mostly made by fb devs, some Google, some Microsoft too.
You can use your battery usage stats to see who knows how to code and triage the apps you Need vs ones you may not…
Deleting all Facebook created apps is amazing, I still use Instagram, and force quit it too, it doesn’t seem to be made by the same amateur / who knows what team as the messenger and main FB “apps”
Last 24 hours Gmail took 22% of my battery. I have to kill it regularly.
To my knowledge, the team that created Instagram remained largely intact after their purchase by Facebook, which may be why it doesn’t have this same issue. The monetization strategy there seems to be less integrated with the rest of Facebook.
Seems that way, the only hiccup was when they shifted from AWS to Facebook hosted, doesn’t seem to be an issue now. Hope it stays pure, never integrated or I’ll have to dump it as well.