Facebook is the most downloaded social media app in the world. But, it also happens to be the app that puts the most strain on your phone’s battery.
Samuel Gibbs from the Guardian found that uninstalling Facebook app from your phone can boost the battery life by up to 15%. That’s a lot of battery saved!
Ways to use Facebook without the app
The best alternative is to simply use your default browser to go to Facebook. In iOS, you can create a shortcut for any web page and put it on the home screen. The shortcut looks surprisingly similar to the app and only the pickiest among you will be able to tell the difference. So for all intents and purposes, this will just be like an app. You click on it and it will take you straight to the Facebook homepage.
Steps to create the home screen shortcut:
- Open Safari app and go to www.facebook.com
- Enter your login details
- Click on the share menu icon (square with upward pointing arrow)
- Select Add to Home Screen
You can go a step further in Android. By enabling website notification in Chrome, you can get app-like notifications right out of Chrome! This is for those who are really addicted to Facebook and want to know about every like and comment as they appear on their page.
This is not the first time that the Facebook app has come under the scanner. Last year it drew heavy flak from users for draining an outrageous amount of battery even while running in the background. Of course, Facebook was quick to apologise and fix the issue.
What troubles us is not that it happened once, but that it seems to happen again and again. If you value your battery life, it’s best to delete the app. If that isn’t incentive enough, you also get to save a ton of storage! Gibbs found that deleting the app saved 500MB of space since it got rid of all the cached data used by the app.
We hope that Facebook takes heed from all the complaints and does some serious coding magic to fix the issue. It would be a shame to see the App go the way of Free Basics.
