Facebook Background App Refresh Issues: What You Need to Know

One of the biggest problems with the Facebook iPhone app is that iOS constantly struggles with the background app refresh feature. Here’s what you need to know about Facebook background app refresh issues.

Many iPhone users have been complaining about Facebook battery life issues for a while, but why is the social media app so bad at managing battery life? This is because the app will continue to consume resources while running in the background, even if you have strictly prohibited it from running in the background.

iOS 9 has a feature called Background App Refresh that lets you enable or disable an app from using resources while it’s closed in the background. For example, if you allow an app to access Background App Refresh, turning it off and leaving it in the background will allow the app to keep refreshing with information.

So, if Google Maps is running in the background, it may still use GPS to update your location as you move.

With the Facebook app, when a friend posts a status update or a photo on their Timeline, it may continue to refresh to appear later in your News Feed. A feature like this makes it faster to refresh Facebook when you come back to the app.

However, it’s a huge waste of battery, so your first course of action would probably be to go to the Settings app and then go to where you can turn off Facebook and prevent it from refreshing in the background.

Another issue is location tracking, so if you have location services enabled for the Facebook app, you can go to Settings and turn it off by going to . However, iPhone users say that disabling both these features does not fix their battery draining problems.

A Reddit user Claims Facebook app uses VoIP To bypass these features and continue running in the background:

“Skype or similar VoIP apps are allowed to run in the background without background refresh enabled because how else do you receive calls without the app opening? Facebook uses this to run all their traffic not just through the Facebook calls they include in that app (probably just to use this exploit).

Facebook this battery hog has addressed their complaints and it applied a fix in October, but the Messenger app still suffers from the same issues. Leaving the Messenger app running in the background can consume quite a bit of battery and hopefully the company fixes this app as well.

Facebook’s Paper app doesn’t come with any of the noted battery life issues.

But for now, the best way to prevent these apps from draining your battery is to close the app completely when you’re done using them. In other words, double-click the Home button to bring up the app switcher and then swipe up on the app to close it completely.

From there, it no longer uses batteries as it is completely off and not working.

Of course, the Facebook app has other issues like increasing the amount of storage it takes from the cache and this can usually be fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling the app, but this is mostly annoying.