iPhone 6S Plus review: barely better than the iPhone 6 Plus.
The results will vary for the smaller iPhone 6S, as it has a smaller battery and shorter battery life overall, but judging by the 6S Plus experience, removing the Facebook app in preference of using the social network in Safari will extend the battery life of any iPhone.Ī Facebook spokesperson said the company was investigating the matter. Tapping a link on the Facebook mobile site opens a new Safari tab. The only restriction was the Share-to function, which does not exist for websites, meaning that to share photos I had to manually hit the “post photos” button on the mobile site.įeatures of the app, such as Instant Articles, are also not available. You can even place a shortcut to Facebook in Safari on the homescreen that looks almost identical to the app’s icon (the white is a little less bright but you need eagle eyes to see). Using Facebook in Safari was almost as good as the app. Spot the difference: one is the Facebook app, the other the Facebook mobile site. They all found similar results, with increased battery life when using Facebook in Safari having uninstalled the main Facebook iOS app. To make sure that this wasn’t an isolated incident, I also recruited several other Facebook-using iPhone owners to conduct a similar test. I had also saved space, because 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. On average I had 15% more battery left by 10.30pm each day. I also left the Facebook Messenger app installed. I accessed Facebook for the same amount of time, and for the same purposes, using the social network’s excellent mobile site within Safari, as I had done using the app. I charged the phone overnight, taking it off the charger at 7.30am, and used it normally. Using an iPhone 6S Plus for a week without the main Facebook app installed, I recorded the battery life at 10.30pm each day for a week comparing it to a daily average taken from a week with the app. An alternative to uninstalling Facebook is using the hump from Apple’s Smart Battery case.