I would like to start this blog post off by stating that I am not an entirely huge fan of Facebook. Though I have to admit that it can be useful for some scenarios such as re connecting with old friends or keeping up to date on the happenings in your neighborhood. The problem is, for every good thing I can say about the social media tech giant, there is about 20 other less than gleaming qualities that I could point out. So needless to say I don’t really frequent Facebook on a regular basis which ended up leading me to discovering something that all smartphone users should be aware of.

Now if you’re a Facebook user, then you most likely have the Facebook app installed on your phone. Upon installing such an app you also have to agree to a terms of service which pretty much signs your entire device away to Facebook. Once given the proper permission, the app will then run in the background in order to keep tabs on things and give the user regular notifications of their news feed and what not. Since Facebook’s product is information, not a social media platform, the app also runs who knows what other processes in order to keep a specific log on the user as well which is used for advertisement purposes.

Now all ethics aside, the Facebook app was using up a large amount of my phones resources. I found it rather ridiculous that an app that I use so little is also the app that was using up so much of my cellphone battery. The battery life of smartphones is absolutely terrible to begin with and Facebook somehow managed to make it worse by  having such a heavily running application.

So I started to do some research and I found that one can save 20% of their phones battery life if they are to just simply delete their Facebook app. Now many people are addicted to Facebook so this may seem absolutely impossible for them to do. But the reality is that there are many alternatives to access Facebook rather than using their app.

If you use Android then you may want to look into an app called Metal which is essentially a wrapper for Facebook. It doesn’t give you annoying updates and it is actually quite good. I personally use Metal and it works really well, and I have noticed a tremendous difference in my phones battery life and responsiveness. If you’re an IOS user there is also an app called Friendly which I can’t really vouch for but has similar reviews to what Metal has on the Android end of things.

What is your experience with Facebook’s app? Let me know in the comments section.