Apple iPhone users who uninstalled Facebook as the phone's battery was draining quite fast can reinstate the social networking app on their phones as the problem has finally been resolved.
The world's largest social networking site, Facebook, rolled out an update to its iOS app on Thursday that fixes the iPhone's battery drain issue. While the changelog for the new update remains cryptic about the battery drain issue, Facebook's engineering manager Ari Grant acknowledged the app's shortcomings and explained the main cause behind it.
In a Facebook post shared by Grant on Friday, the extensive battery drain on iPhones was caused due to two main issues and neither were related to constant location tracking as previous reports had claimed. According to Grant, Facebook's iOS app was hit by "CPU spin" and background active audio sessions.
"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," Grant wrote defining CPU spin, adding the repeated behavior strained the iPhone battery.
The second issue causing the iOS app to consume higher than usual battery was related to the audio sessions. When the user watches a video on Facebook and leaves the app, the process is instantly stopped. But the flaw in the iOS app did not put the audio session to sleep even after the user had left, playing the audio silently.
"The app isn't actually doing anything while awake in the background, but it does use more battery simply by being awake," Grant added.
However, to the iPhone users' relief, the updated version of the Facebook app on iTunes resolves both the issues and guarantees optimum performance in the future.
