Delete Facebook’s app if you care about your phone’s battery life

There are many things that can cause a phone’s battery to drain. For example, it might drain due to excess usage. It could also be due to faulty hardware, or a bug in an app or the operating system that causes the battery to drain unnecessarily. Or sometimes, an app might  be doing it on purpose.

That’s according to former Meta employee, George Hayward. In a report from The New York Post, Hayward claims that Facebook engages in what is known as “negative testing”, where the app will purposely drain the batteries of the phone on a user’s phone in order to test out new features.

While we can understand that a company might want to test its app in the real world to see how it responds to actual users, Hayward claims that this is dangerous and that it has the potential to harm someone. This is because what if the person needed to make an emergency call but couldn’t because the app drained all of their phone’s battery?

Now, we can’t say for sure if Hayward’s claims are true since to be fair, we haven’t really experienced any particularly excessive drain on our batteries with the Facebook app installed. Plus, it sounds like Meta doesn’t perform this kind of negative testing on a wide audience and that it might be a select handful of users, and given the number of Facebook users in the world, some of us might never encounter this issue, but either way it’s something to think about.

Source: The New York Post