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Improve iPhone’s Battery Life 15 Percent By Deleting This App

By Thomas Kuegler
Published on: 00:09 PST, Feb 8, 2016

You can improve your iPhone’s battery life right now by doing something that will take you literally five seconds: delete the Facebook app. Your iPhone 6s battery life could depend on it, and if you have the iPhone 6, battery life could depend on it even more since older phones start losing their charge over time.

The Guardian reports that the Facebook app used to pull a few tricks to stay active in the background, even when consumers would turn off the background app refresh selection of their phone. Facebook has since fixed the bugs in the app.

For Android users, deleting the Facebook app improved battery life by over 20 percent, so Samuel Gibbs, a writer at the Guardian, decided to test it and discern whether it would improve iPhone’s battery life too.

Since he had a new iPhone, he would be testing the iPhone 6s battery life.

He recorded his findings, writing, “I charged the phone overnight, taking it off the charger at 7.30am, and used it normally. I accessed Facebook for the same amount of time, and for the same purposes, using the social network’s excellent mobile site within Safari, as I had done using the app. I also left the Facebook Messenger app installed.”

He said that the move will improve iPhone’s battery life by 15 percent if the rest of consumers followed suit. He noted that he also saved a ton of space on the phone — nearly 500MB — since deleting the app because of its cache.

To see whether or not it was an isolated incident, he decided to test the iPhone 6s battery life a few more times with other users, but they all found the same thing he did.

For those that may not want to part with the Facebook app, there is good news.

Gibbs writes, “Using Facebook in Safari was almost as good as the app. You can even place a shortcut to Facebook in Safari on the home screen that looks almost identical to the app’s icon (the white is a little less bright but you need eagle eyes to see). The only restriction was the Share-to function, which does not exist for websites, meaning that to share photos I had to manually hit the “post photos” button on the mobile site.”

All in all, Samuel Gibbs thinks that this one action will improve iPhone’s battery life significantly for all users across all devices, whether that’s the iPhone 6 battery life or the iPhone 6s battery life.

Facebook has since declared that they’re investigating the matter.

The Super Bowl just ended, and Apple didn’t have any advertisements air during the big game at all this year. But that didn’t stop CEO Tim Cook from showing up at the game to take a blurry picture.

Sports Illustrated reports that Tim Cook showed up at the game, with his iPhone 6s battery life significantly high, to take a blurry picture of the field after the game.

Many Twitter users got on the popular CEO to shame him for taking such a horrible picture, but given that the tensions were so high, it’s understandable that a picture might not be the clearest.

For now, go ahead and delete that Facebook app to improve your iPhone’s battery life.

[Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]

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