If you are using Facebook on iOS and you’re wondering why your phone is no longer lasting as long as it should, you can partly blame Facebook for that. The company had recently promised to fix the battery drain although they did not share what was causing the problem, leading many to wonder what could be the issue.
As it turns out, it seems that background audio usage could be the reason for the battery drain. According to a report from MacStories, it was noticed that the app was showing high levels of background audio usage even with the app’s background refresh feature turned off. Federico Viticci of MacStories has speculated that this might be the case.
According to him, “My guess is that Facebook is hijacking audio sessions on iOS by keeping silent audio in the background whenever a video plays in the app. And because, by default, videos on Facebook auto-play on both Wi-Fi and Cellular and few people ever bother to turn it off, that means there’s a high chance the Facebook app will always find a way to play a video, keep audio in the background, and consume energy to perform background tasks.”
Prior to this, some had speculated that the battery drain might be due to the heavy usage of Location Services, but a Facebook spokesperson told Motherboard that this was not the case. “We are not tracking background location if the location setting is off on your device or in the app.” In any case until a fix has been released, iOS users will have no choice but to wait.