Click to Skip Ad
Closing in...

The simplest way to improve your iPhone’s battery performance by 15%

Published Feb 8th, 2016 10:06AM EST
Facebook iPhone App Battery Performance
Image: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

It can’t be said enough: Uninstalling the Facebook app does some wonderful things for your phone. Last week we pointed to some tests that showed uninstalling Facebook from your Android phone could improve its battery life by as much as 20% and now there are new tests that show you can get a similar battery boost by uninstalling the app from your iPhone. Specifically, The Guardian’s Samuel Gibbs has found that “uninstalling Facebook’s iOS app and switching to Safari can save up to 15% of iPhone battery life.”

FROM EARLIER: The Internet is having a field day with Tim Cook’s blurry Super Bowl photo

Gibbs recorded his typical battery life for a week before uninstalling the Facebook app and then using Safari to access the social networking website online. After a week of using the phone without the Facebook iOS app installed, he discovered that his battery performance was on average 15% better and he had a lot more storage on his device as well.

“At the point I had deleted the Facebook app it had consumed around 500MB in total combining the 111MB of the app itself and its cache on the iPhone,” he explains. It goes without saying that you won’t have that particular issue if you just access Facebook through Safari.

Best of all, Facebook’s mobile site lets you do almost everything you can do through its mobile app, although some features such as Instant Articles aren’t available. Even so, if you aren’t a heavy Facebook user and you want to give your iPhone an instant battery boost, uninstalling the Facebook iOS app seems like a prudent move.

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.