Connect with execs from The New York Times, TIME, Dotdash Meredith and many more
Facebook is publicly apologizing to users of its iOS app after it was discovered that it drained people’s batteries.
The issue was identified last week by Circa co-founder Matt Gilligan, writing on Medium that even with the background refresh turned off and the app shut down, it accounted for 15 percent of all battery drain in one charge.
“Whether we’re talking about battery life, data usage, or load times, they’re all valuable resources to mobile customers,” he said, demanding that Facebook make a “priority” in fixing the annoyance.
More than a week after Gilligan’s post exposing the problem affecting the iPhone’s most downloaded app ever, Facebook’s engineering manager Ari Grant said the problem has been fixed in a public post on the social network.
Turns out, the issue centers around “CPU spin,” said Grant explaining “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.” In this case the app was repeatedly asking the phone to carry out an unnecessary task. That repeating process caused the battery to bleed energy.
That, combined with a faulty audio issue that wasn’t powered off after watching a video, resulting in the unintended and the very annoying battery drainage. “We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused,” Grant wrote.
An update being released today is supposed to fix the issues.
Images via Shutterstock.
More in Media
IAB Tech Lab pitches plan to help publishers gain control of LLM scraping
The IAB Tech Lab wants to unite all compute edge companies and publishers to create a technical standard for LLM crawler monetization, before pitching to the AI companies.
Three publishers’ workforce diversity reports show DEI efforts remain sluggish
Overall, staff diversity at The New York Times, Hearst and Condé Nast has either marginally improved or stalled in 2024, according to their annual workforce diversity data this year.
Retail media meets publishing: News UK, Future and Ocado tap clean room tech for smarter data targeting
News UK, The Independent, Immediate Media and Future are teaming up with retail media network Ocado to test clean room-powered data matching.