Facebook iOS App Background Activity

[duffers20]

I have recently noticed that my iPhone 5S (running the latest iOS version) has been eating through battery life at quite a pace.

After a quick check in the Battery Usage section, I noticed that the Facebook app was the culprit and has a large percentage of use (over 30%) marked as Background Activity.

I have the the global Background App Refresh switched on but have had it turned off for Facebook for quite sometime now. Also, the Facebook app is kept up to date.

My question is: how can the Facebook app be using battery life with 'background activity' if the app hasn't been allowed to use Background App Refresh? Am I missing the point of Background App Refresh?

Thanks

 

[duffers20]

Glad to hear its not just me.

I still don't understand how the app can actually perform background activities when its been explicitly set to not do so.

I might ask a friend who has an Apple Developer subscription to see if we can perform any diagnostics to see if the device is doing anything 'in the background' and if so, what its actually doing as I'm curious!

 

[duffers20]

Direct from Apple's support site. I'd say with Facebook's iOS app history as being a hog on resources its not a massive surprise.

I still can't believe that Apple actually allow this!

What is the point of having such a fine-grained selection process for allowing apps to run in the background if they are going to allow 'some background activity' to continue.

Slightly frustrated with Apple. The whole point of the restrictions they place on apps running on their devices is to protect the user from apps (regardless of the developer) to do things like use excessive battery life, or use cellular data when they have been restricted not to.