Is Facebook killing your iPhone’s battery or are you? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook killing your iPhone’s battery or are you?

blog.gotenna.com

17 pointsdaniper12 comments

From yesterday:

"We recently heard reports of some people experiencing battery issues with the Facebook iOS app and have been looking into the causes of these problems. We found a few key issues and have identified additional improvements, some of which are in the version of the app that was released today."

https://www.facebook.com/arig/posts/10105815276466163

Yes, apps (like Facebook's) which are drawing lots of current in the background is part of it -- but the point of our team's hacking into the iPhone was to find out what else really affects your phone's battery. It's not just background apps updating.

Nothing we discovered in the lab is 'revolutionary' -- everyone knows your battery gets used up more when the screen is brighter, and when your phone is trying to find a tower or router to connect to, but we just wanted to put some numbers behind it.

Hope it was useful; we had fun breaking open an iPhone regardless ;-)

The article doesn't seem to address the actual cause that the articles linked at the top highlighted, background updating. The Verge article especially was all about background processing issues which the tests and power saving advice don't seem to address at all.

You're right, it's almost as if the piece was written purely as content marketing to promote the gotenna ;) Interesting nonetheless!

Lol, we did these lab tests before we thought of turning what we learned into a post (if we had really been strategically content marketing, we wouldn't have posted this at 8 pm on a Friday night haha). Mostly, we wanted to break open an iPhone — that's what happens when a hardware team is in TGIF mode ;-)

In any case, it's not just background apps updating. Although yes, that's part of it. We wanted to learn more beyond what the iOS battery-monitoring feature will give you -- which is which apps are consuming which % of your iPhone's battery, both when you're actively using them and when they're running in the background.

For our own purposes, we were particularly interested in the interaction of location services and Bluetooth-LE which are required for own product to be useful. We threw in general "futzing" and screen brightness as well out of curiosity. And while our team knew that trying to connect to towers & routers ate your battery a lot (easily observed by just turning your phone into Airplane Mode -- can last for weeks!), we had no idea it could be as much as 250 mA every few seconds!

I agree with you. I think that a wifi in the same room to test the apps could be better aproach.

The tower can not be accurate for this.

This isn't exactly related to the article, but I think this post is an amazing example of how to write an interesting blog post yet, at the same time tie it to what you are selling and make people want to know more about your product without directly telling them to.

I was thinking it was an amazing way to avoid telling people why the product hasn't shipped yet. They've been doing pre-orders for more than a year. Sometime in there it went from $149 a pair to $199 a pair. I admire the desire to make something "absolutely perfect", but perfect products don't ship.

We started shipping earlier this month, which is why the price went up from the prior pre-order discounted number.

Stay tuned for a novel-length blog themed around something like, "Why Manufacturing & Supply Chain Are 100X Harder (& Take 100X Longer) Than Everyone Tells You". But I'm sort of still in PTSD mode. ;-)

Well done for shipping!

Thanks! :-D

Our hardware team has been working on our next product for a few months -- that's why they found time to hack into iPhone batteries, lol, as work on the first product has been handed off to supply chain & manufacturing for the most part. ;-)

Meanwhile, the rest of the engineering team is working on firmware & software updates to make the hardware we're already shipping even better/more interesting (and of course, responding to first consumers' feedback).

But... you know what? Sorry for going on a tangent. All I really want to say is thanks, means a lot. Sometimes it's hard to enjoy these victories because you get so focused on the next uphill battle. ;-)

Thanks. We actually didn't do this for strategic content marketing purposes — we just did the lab tests out of our own curiosity/desire to open up an iPhone on a late Friday night. Once we had the data we figured it might be interesting to share with others. It also helps us now give even more specific answers to people who often ask us: "How much does Bluetooth drain my battery?" "How much does toggling into Airplane Mode do to conserve battery?"

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