BYOD battery bloodbath? Facebook 'fesses up to crook code If you've gone down the bring your own device (BYOD) route and your users are always complaining about battery life, Facebook has just explained why: its iOS app sucks … ridiculous amounts of power. The Social Network™'s engineering manager Ari Grant took to his own platform to note “reports of some people experiencing battery …
The up-to-date Android f*book bundled in most manufacturer loads will run non-stop sucking 100% CPU and leaking memory if you do not have a f***book account and if you are not using it. At least on Xperia SP, M and E3 (non-operator factory load). I had to disable it on all phones in the household.
You could put it that way!
This kind of thing isn't a very good advert for an organisation.
With an outfit like Facebook their investors need to know that the comany has an A team of programmers creating their apps (which need to look good and work well) and, more importantly, their server backend software (which needs to use as little power as possible, power being one of the company's major costs).
Putting out a shite app suggests that the A team is employed elsewhere...
This assumes they have an A team to begin with.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of developers have very little experience in writing code that is very efficient... Mostly cause current economics doesn't favour them to do so. Nowadays everyone takes the attitude of 'lets just throw more hardware at it', cause that's cheaper than having a team of developers pour over code to improve efficiency.
On regular computers, no one cares, and it's not really considered a problem, until those same attitudes are carried over to mobile development.
Funny, I was reading only yesterday afternoon on SlashDot that AVG has released a report showing Facebook to be the top battery slurping app for android also:
http://now.avg.com/are-these-the-worlds-greediest-smartphone-apps/
This kind of sucks - I am a very infrequent user (only really use it because the wife, parents and extended family do and its easy to keep in touch this way) - but on days where I don't login, I still get my battery hammered for the priviledge.
This post has been deleted by its author
I've long been planning to fire up a VM and measure how much traffic something like verge takes to load. And MORE IMPORTANTLY - just to stay in the background tab.
Anecdotical evidence suggests that results would be shocking, just haven't had the time to get to it. Someone with white hat could do it (referencing me as an idea, would be appreciated).
"I've always found", you missed a word.
I'm genuinely surprised this is news, FB has been a notorious battery killer for as long as they've had an Android app. It's why my current LG G2 is the 1st Android device I haven't rooted, it doesn't have that crap built in so doesn't need heroic effort to tame it. Had to remove 14 separate APKs from system to kill all the FB,Twitter and other crap on my last (ever) Sony phone.
They regularly throw in a placebo 'fix' for it, only very occasionally does it improve till the next update. I suppose relatively few noticed it because so many phones ship with this shit deeply embedded, where it can't be removed and in earlier Androids couldn't be disabled - easy to spot a new install hammered battery, not so when it's always been there.
Twitter has been pretty bad at times but they seem to have got better at making it behave itself, concentrating on breaking the apps functions instead ;)
'Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals'
Speaking as an aforementioned social outcast - I am happy to be so. Looking at what passes for insight on social media like Facebook makes me despair of humanity. If I want to contact someone I pick up the phone or even Skype. Looking at the social droppings on Facebook leaves me unimpressed.
"Given the number of phones in the world, I sometimes wonder how much energy such problems waste globally..."
When I was a lad (1970s), we used to drive around for hours every evening as entertainment. 3.7L engine slurping cheap fuel. Burning up tires and breaking rear axles.
Things *are* getting better.
"...upgrading your BYOD-wielders..."
For maximum lulz (seeing as how it is Friday and all) do like I did and misread that part as "BYOD-welders". Maybe it's just me but I find the idea of a bunch of corporate suits toting around their own heavy MIG/TIG welders on caster wheels remarkably amusing...
We need regulatory oversight around software companies after they reach a certain scale, simply because computational errors like these impose a significant cost on society. If millions of people are getting significantly shorter battery life on their phones because of this bug, we can say with confidence that at least thousands of people will be inconvenienced and possibly even endangered because they lose communications at a critical time.
Lost in a bad neighborhood after dark with no phone or GPS? Or car break down on a sparsely traveled road? These are situations that can go from annoyance to disaster in the wake of battery failure.
Another issue is the externalized cost of all this excess consumption - millions of batteries will reach end-of-life and end up in a landfill sooner than planned, and more coal will have been burned to charge these devices more often. We can assume the same level of amateur software is running on the datacenter, where the shareholders are paying for wasted electricity because of sloppy programming practices.
We simply can't afford to have poorly written software deployed at this scale without some kind of competent oversight, because its obvious companies like Facebook are not producing quality products, since they live in a make-believe world of unlimited energy and cash, unlike the rest of us.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
