I always wondered why Facebook seems to use a lot of the battery on my phone even on days where I hardly touch the app at all. There have been as many as 5 days where I haven’t launched the app, or had it running in the background and yet when my battery reports it seemed lower than it normally should (and on a relatively new iPhone 13 Pro Max) I just couldn’t understand why, until I looked at the per-app breakdown of battery usage. You can see in the screenshot below, that Facebook is the largest consumer of the battery by far, and that the phone is telling me that this is all background activity. In this instance, I hadn’t used the app for nearly 24 hours, but yet the Facebook app was the largest battery user!
In reading some news headlines, I found this article on Phone Arena that also confirmed I am not alone:
https://www.phonearena.com/news/facebook-drains-phone-batteries-intentionally_id145227
This news comes from an ex-facebook employee who actually felt this was completely unethical, and as such, he was fired for it. Facebook ought to be sued for doing a practice like this as it does really put people at real risk by prematurely depleting a phone’s battery. We all rely on the safety & security that a phone provides, and this has real potential to injure someone who may have a dire need to communicate.
To show solidarity, I have deleted ALL of facebook’s apps from my phone and will only post from a computer when I desire to post anything. Facebook, I suppose I should thank you for helping me spend a lot less time on your platform.
