Image: Flickr/Mike Beauchamp
If you've been noticing your iPhone's battery running out quicker than in the past, Facebook's iOS app might be to blame.Circa co-founder Matt Galligan wrote on Medium today that his Facebook app was running in the background even when his iPhone's background refresh feature was turned off, which normally prevents apps from running when you're not using them.There are a few theories out there about what the app is doing—silent audio or push notifications are just two—but Facebook isn't commenting on any of them.According to a screenshot of Gilligan's iPhone's battery usage report, this background activity accounted for 15 percent of his battery drain. When I checked mine, Facebook accounted for 29 percent in the last seven days.Apple allowed all apps to run in the background in 2013 with the rollout of iOS 7, so Facebook may have been sucking batteries dry without users' knowledge for over a year."Unless the app is playing audio in the background, Apple's normally pretty strict about not letting apps abuse background modes in this way," Jonathan Zdziarski, a security researcher, wrote me over email. "This is a pretty blatant abuse of iOS, and it's no surprise the batteries are draining."A Facebook spokesperson confirmed over email that the company is aware of the reports, and is investigating the issue. "We're looking into this and hope to have a fix in place soon," the spokesperson wrote. Facebook must be busy—just yesterday, a bug on Facebook's mobile site that let users see view counts on theirs and others' posts was revealed.Apple declined Motherboard's request to comment on the record.As for what users can do right now, at the moment it comes down to waiting for a fix from Facebook. Or, Zdziarski suggested, "uninstall Facebook."
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