Taiwan: We’ve featured a number of ways to save battery life on your smartphone before, but there may be an easier way to get up to 20% more juice on your iPhone: Stop using the Facebook app. Following Android Central’s discovery last month that the Facebook app could drain Android smartphone batteries by as much as 20%. The Guardian’s Samuel Gibbs performed a similar week-long test using an iPhone 6S and found that by removing the app he was able to save up up to 15% in battery life. Instead of using the Facebook app, Gibbs accessed the social network through the web using the Safari web browser. “On average I had 15% more battery,” said Gibbs. Facebook Messenger, however, wasn’t removed.
Gibbs said he had other iPhone users perform a similar test, removing the Facebook app from their device and they all reported similar battery savings using Safari to access Facebook instead of using the app. Not only did removing the Facebook app from his iPhone conserve more battery life, it also gave him a chunk of storage back; Gibbs says he regained about 500MB (111MB for the app and the rest from the app's cached data).
Though you'll get most of the Facebook app's features through the mobile website, some — like notifications — are only available by using the app. "The only restriction was the Share-to function, which does not exist for websites, meaning that to share photos I had to manually hit the “post photos” button on the mobile site," said Gibbs. "Features of the app, such as Instant Articles, are also not available." So there you have it. If you want to squeeze as much battery life out of your phone, ditch the Facebook app. For what it's worth, Snapchat is another app that chews through battery life like there's no tomorrow, although there's no web equivalent for that particular service. If deleting these "essential" apps isn't an option, maybe consider getting a battery case or battery pack to charge your phone up when you're on the go.
