"We recently heard reports of some people experiencing battery issues with the Facebook iOS app and have been looking into the causes of these problems. We found a few key issues and have identified additional improvements, some of which are in the version of the app that was released today."
Nothing we discovered in the lab is 'revolutionary' -- everyone knows your battery gets used up more when the screen is brighter, and when your phone is trying to find a tower or router to connect to, but we just wanted to put some numbers behind it.
Hope it was useful; we had fun breaking open an iPhone regardless ;-)
In any case, it's not just background apps updating. Although yes, that's part of it. We wanted to learn more beyond what the iOS battery-monitoring feature will give you -- which is which apps are consuming which % of your iPhone's battery, both when you're actively using them and when they're running in the background.
For our own purposes, we were particularly interested in the interaction of location services and Bluetooth-LE which are required for own product to be useful. We threw in general "futzing" and screen brightness as well out of curiosity. And while our team knew that trying to connect to towers & routers ate your battery a lot (easily observed by just turning your phone into Airplane Mode -- can last for weeks!), we had no idea it could be as much as 250 mA every few seconds!
The tower can not be accurate for this.
Stay tuned for a novel-length blog themed around something like, "Why Manufacturing & Supply Chain Are 100X Harder (& Take 100X Longer) Than Everyone Tells You". But I'm sort of still in PTSD mode. ;-)
