The Facebook App Really Is Killing Your Android’s Performance

By Jonathan Zhou, Epoch Times
February 1, 2016 Last Updated: February 1, 2016
A promoter display one of the latest smart phones from ZTE, the Blade L2, using the OS Android 4.4 KitKat platform, during its launch in Singapore on Aug. 13, 2014. (Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images; effects added by Epoch Times)

Do you feel that your Android’s is getting slower and slower to use? You’re not alone.

It’s been long rumored that Facebook is a major drain on performance and battery life, and it’s not hard to find Android bloggers describing how a deletion of the app made their phone run faster and last longer, but is the effect real, or just a mistaken intuition?

One Reddit user decided to put that view to the test, in a genuinely scientific manner, tracking the speed of 15 apps with the DiscoMark benchmarking app, both with the Facebook and Messenger app, and without them.

He found that with both of the apps uninstalled, the 15 tested apps took significantly less time to start, with the total start-time declining from 7 to 6 seconds, a performance increase of 14 percent.

The Facebook app has also been criticized for its heavy usage of the iPhone’s resources.

The apps he tested were 20 Minuten, Kindle, AnkiDroid, ASVZ, Audible, Calculator, Camera, Chrome, Gallery, Gmail, ricardo.ch, Shazam, Spotify, Wechat, Whatsapp.

The Facebook app has also been criticized for its heavy usage of the iPhone’s resources by tech journalists.

“Every time I take a look at a friend’s iPhone, Facebook is the app with the highest amount of battery usage in the background–even with Background App Refresh turned off,” wrote Federico Vittici, author of the popular blog MacStories. “This has been going on for years, and instead of fixing the issue, it does seem like Facebook is always coming up with new ways to circumvent user control and consume more energy.”

In October, Facebook said it would hope to have “a fix soon” for the battery problem, TechCrunch reports. As of January, people are still complaining about the app’s battery problem.