Not only does facebook eat away all your time each day, but it may actually be eating away at your precious battery too!
A large number of Android users were delighted to see that the official facebook app had received a very nice graphical update with its update 1.3 a few days ago. But ever since then people have noticed their batteries seem to be draining faster than usual. A lot of speculation has been going around the world wide web, some people saying it’s android 2.2, others have come to the conclusion it’s the new facebook update.
No one realized until just recently that the new update actually includes process that calls a state called “Partial Wake Lock†where essentially your screen can time out and turn off like normal, but the CPU and the phone itself don’t actually enter sleep mode because this process is keeping it alive! This means it is constantly updating while your CPU and phone are running (with the screen off) which is constantly draining your battery until you restart your phone or kill the process!
There’s actually a quote from the Android Developer site saying: “Device battery life will be significantly affected by the use of this API. Do not acquire WakeLocks unless you really need them, use the minimum levels possible, and be sure to release it as soon as you can.
If you hold a partial wakelock, the CPU will continue to run, irrespective of any timers and even after the user presses the power button.â€
This issue was further investigated by flipz over at geekfor.me (link below) and he found that the new facebook code does infact contain that process so that as soon as you login, it activates and doesn’t stop until you kill the process yourself.
You can easily see if it is happening to your phone by going to Settings->About Phone-> Battery Use and you can see right from there the Phone Idle %, if this is getting fairly high then you know while your phone is in idle it’s still draining your battery!!!
Right now there is no fix for the issue except for killing the process, logging out of facebook, or finding a way to downgrade yourself back to facebook 1.2!
**Update** the face book team have just released a new update 1.3.1! Hopefully this will fix the not sleeping problem, anyone notice a difference?