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Oh look, more both sides bullshit.

I used to be able to tell if a notification was from messenger without looking at my phone, because 5 minutes later my phone would be 40-50 degrees warmer in my pocket.

Tik Tok, FB are two bad apps to have. They are running constantly in the background and will wear your battery out.

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strict no meta app on my phone policy

It’s not possible for an app to run constantly in the background on iOS, at least, unless in special cases (recoding or audio streaming mode, completing a data transfer and periodic stuff). But yeah it can still use a fair amount with those activities.

Hello former democratic campaigner here. There are devils waiting in the wings that would love nothing more than to make people suffer. Don’t kid yourself.

Hey Bubba pick your knuckles off the ground and be objective.

Democrats keep those types of people in the wings. Republicans welcome them with open arms.

Both sides are not the same.

You are right but FB, TikTok, Instagram etc are all hogs from the second they are opened. You are downloading high quality images and videos left and right, even if you don’t look at them.

I understand why people would think it does it “in the background”. It’s because they get a simple push notification which has no effect on their battery…. Then they open it in Facebook, and even if they immediately close it, it probably downloaded 10mb of content in that half of a second.

Oh the poor billionaires!

Right, true.

The fb app literally keeps the phone in audio streaming mode by playing a blank audio stream so it can maintain a constant background state. There were articles posted about it years ago.

It's why I moved away from Samsung. Fucking Facebook app embedded itself like a damn virus

For Democrats it’s moral failure, for Republicans it’s party policy.

Secretly? Its one of the reasons I stopped using the app way before I stopped using Facebook.

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I have samsung and dont have the facebook app.

>It’s not possible for an app to run constantly in the background on iOS

Background App Refresh?

This is literally on my iPad.

>Allow apps to refresh their content when on Wi-Fi in the background. Turning off apps may help preserve battery life.

Its based on what the carrier demands be installed.

Yabbut lookit all the good things that Fecebook does for you!

Fortunately, iPhones don’t have any meta apps no matter what carrier you use or country you’re in.

Does messenger do this shit too?

I think it's amazing that we're still learning how much of a shitty company Facebook/Meta really is after so many years now.

What’s it smell like in there?

Not even secretly. My old Galaxy S7 couldn't get through a half day fully charged until I deleted that app. Battery life almost doubled. Didn't have charge my phone at lunchtime anymore.

Tough to use a Samsung without WhatsApp

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You can get one unlocked.

Yeah but then you have to own an iPhone. I bought an iPhone 12 because I was excited by the privacy stuff from Apple. And I got rid of it after a year and went back to a stock android experience because it's so much better. Wouldn't go with Samsung either.

But anyway it turns out Apple is basically scanning your local files for law enforcement. I mean we all want CP gone, but fuck that shit.

You can just disable it on Samsung. It's incredibly easy to do.

> There were articles posted about it years ago.

The key point is “years ago”, but you used the present tense in your comment. Why? This bug (or not, whatever may be the case) was removed years ago as well.

So no, it literally doesn’t do that.

Yeah, but you can do surprisingly little with that feature. And it certainly doesn’t let the app run constantly in the background.

• give you anxiety
• increase your blood pressure
• sell your data to third parties
• actively disrespect your privacy

Mm yes the good things

Look at something long enough you can imagine anything

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I remember coming across the quote from Zuck along the lines of "I don't know why the fuck anyone would trust it" while he was talking about future of FB

Of all there bad things that can be said about Facebook / Meta, this is the most story about nothing I’ve ever heard.

So basically this one guy who worked for Facebook, saw a document called “thoughtful negative testing”, describes nothing of what it contains, but assumes from it that FB was purposely draining users’ batteries, while the nypost (which is basically, the Fox News version of “People”) exaggerates it to be “life threatening”.

Every company on earth tests whether their features impact battery life, it’s not “evil”.

There’s no story here.

Let’s talk about the really bad things Mets actually does.

People here love to tell you how technology works and why companies do what they do.

Also, Reddit technology is perfect and Reddit is perfect company.

Giant echo chamber.

This may be how it happened in the past, but now Android will tell you if something is running in the background. Facebook doesn't ever come up.

Negative experiments can be really useful because they can highlight the inflection point beyond which users are negatively impacted and begin changing behaviors. 10-15 years ago tech companies did a few crappy surveys, made a bunch of guesses and hoped users liked it.

Of course Reddit assumes the worst and that Facebook doesn’t care but guess what users can’t do with a dead battery - use Facebook.

The word “batteries” was off the right side of my screen so the headline said

“Facebook secretly killed users, worker claims in lawsuit”

and I thought - well that’s taking it to the next level, but not entirely surprising

To be fair, there are settings to disable the automatic downloads of media (primarily used for WiFi vs. Cellular automatic download, but can be disabled completely).

And it's part of them trying to get a better user experience so that when you open/scroll through the app, everything's already loaded.

Obviously, there's a detriment and a double-edged sword: either the app sucks because it takes long to load your feed or the app sucks because it drains your battery

Not on iOS - if you're playing audio, iOS will show the audio/music streaming notification when you switch apps/lock the phone

I don't know why you are getting so many down votes. This is a huge invasion of privacy. I stopped seeing Apple as a "secure" platform when the infinite reboot emote was discovered. I had to resist the urge to send all my friends phones into boot loops. Anyway, it's 2023 and Apple STILL doesn't have a modern GIF compatible keyboard.

I would be more surprised to read about Facebook/Meta NOT doing something evil, to be quite honest.

Yeah, there's lots of things they don't have, like a fanbase that doesn't act like toxic vegans in some join-or-die cult, or software engineers that can figure out basic luxury features like Always-On Display in a reasonable timeframe.

The complete non-hassle of having to buy my phone from literally anywhere other than a carrier is really, really worth not owning an iPhone in my eyes. Can't imagine getting bullied by my phone manufacturer for having friends that don't have iPhones, I left middleschool and that level of behavior a long time ago.

disable. not uninstall.

Fanboys downvoting

And with all the space taken by disabled but uninstallable apps mean only one or two decent size apps can fit.

Bro it's just a phone lol

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apple stans are easily triggered

Why do you say that? I don't have it on my S21

https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5

I just checked on my Verizon S21 and there's no Facebook app installed. I didn't remove it, it just wasn't there when I got it. So, they apparently aren't doing that anymore.

Me either, have Verizon S21

Apps you can only disable, are stored on a completely different segment of the rom. The space was never available for your play apps in the first place. The only thing preinstalled apps are competing for space with, are other preinstalled apps.

Thank you!

In another email to a friend he said he's going to fuck people in the ear.

The guy certainly doesn't mince words.

The app can be force stopped and then disabled.

Maybe so. But if the phone is billed as 16G and they use most of that up even if it's an area that your apps weren't meant to go on so you can only install one or two of your own is still a deception im my opinion and a really shitty thing to do.

Edit: iOS may use some of the 16G for the operating system and bloatware aps as well but not 12G of it like Android does, it was at most 2-5G.

​

Edit 2: "But you can add an SD card on Android." maybe so but it won't hold apps on it only pic and music. And even if you format it as system memory some apps will still not go to it or launch from it.

Right if you "test" in phones owned by your company in a test lab or at the best with employees who volunteer. No right with to test on the general population on their devices.

The trick is to Uninstall Facebook and never reinstall it.

No. That's not how it works. Again, the preinstalled apps only ever compete with other preinstalled. You cannot use that space for regular play store installed apps. Ever. The area isn't writable and has a size that is fixed based on the chipset that is being used.

Also, as someone that has actually used a 16gb 6s recently... You're just dead wrong on how much apple use up by the system. Out of those 16, less than 1g was actually available for use, with every single optional app removed. System itself takes up about 8 and "Other" takes up the rest.

Also, if you're running a 12g android on a 16g phone... Stop using chinese copies that are breaking licenses. 12G means it's full android, which isn't allowed on 16G phones and hasn't been for a long time. These days, 64G minimum for full android. Below that and it should be Android Go which is a stripped down version specifically for low end phones. It only uses about 5G for the system partition (where bundled apps go) as a maximum, though most roms will be even less.

He both described what it contained and that it contained information on experiments that were actually carried out.

From the article: >The practice, known as “negative testing,” allows tech companies to “surreptitiously” run down someone’s mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image might load, according to data scientist George Hayward.

>“How to run thoughtful negative tests,” which included examples of such experiments being carried out.

You can see how butt hurt android users get by the number of downvotes I have for simply pointing out a fact.

Zuck is such a dick

Reddit is as bad as Facebook and Twitter.

I think you may have far too much faith in Apple.

> The area isn't writable and has a size that is fixed based on the chipset that is being used.

Do you have a source for this?

> Stop using chinese copies that are breaking licenses. 12G means it's full android, which isn't allowed on 16G phones and hasn't been for a long time.

And do you have a source for this?

I'm asking because neither match what I think I know about Android.

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My phone stopped charging during lunch.

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>Do you have a source for this?

https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/partitions/system-as-root

>And do you have a source for this?

https://www.android.com/versions/go-edition/

While you could do aosp, since that's apache license, you can't use google play services for it unless you conform to their stricter licenses, such as for low end devices with 2gb of ram and/or 16gb storage, you're only licensed for android go, not full android.

Bro thinks people care what os is on their funny little screen that much

Do you seriously think Reddit doesn't do these very same tests? Or Amazon? Or Google?

Negative testing is an industry wide phenomenon.

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Negative tests don't include battery life tests. This guy is lying because he was part of the November layoffs.

They are always used to quantify things relating to the app, e.g. what happens if the app takes three seconds to load an image instead of half a second? How does that impact revenue?

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This guy probably got laid off and is trying to "get back" at the company. Negative tests do not include battery life tests. They are app-specific, usually include loading speed tests, etc.

Literally every big tech company on the planet does these to quantify the value of say, reducing latency to load a web page or image. When you see the revenue drop from a web page taking 1 second longer to load, you know whether it's worth investing engineering time in.

His jacket is draining my batteries

That's good to know. Thanks.

This is a NY Post story.
NY Post publishes crap.

Just block the Grim Reaper, easy

You can, but some apps refuse to run if they detect that your phone is unlocked. The silliest that I found so far is the McDonalds app

Of course, they did. zuck doesn't care for anybody. Hell, he stole facebook (code) and everyboies data knowing it's not legal, doesn't care.

I haven't been on facebook for over 5 years or longer and a proud fact of mine.

Any app can drain your battery quick. Every programmer has written some inefficient code once upon a time that could hog too much memory or lock up the user interface. Wasting juice is no different.

The question is, why would you do it intentionally? I thought facebook's whole business model revolved around keeping you glued to your screen... If the battery dies, I'm gonna plug in my phone and do something else while it charges.

I have an unlocked phone and had no problems loading the mcdonals app. maybe they improved it since you tried?

Yeah what's the secret here? I want to say around 2015ish messenger would be like 40% of my battery usage and I barely used messenger

Done it long ago. New lifespan for my battery!

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Yesterday an aunt of mine sent me a print screen of an ad. Said nothing about it, just an emoji. 5 minutes later I opened Instagram and lo and behold, the first ad I got is the same as she printed.

So, I was aware of text and audio inputs being watched by meta, but images?? It's sickening

Apple had been doing this with its old MacBooks and iPhones for years now. Ever wonder why MacBooks seem to crap out over time ?

I Uninstalled the app so the only way to get on is through the browser and trying to remember my password. So I usually don't go on it. And ya I noticed this a couple years ago when I looked at battery usage everyday. And it was always top 3 percentage used in a day. Browsed every once and a while but not for longer than my chess puzzles

Thank you for the links.

I don't see anything in the first link to support what you said about a chipset dependent, fixed size and non-writeable partition. I think the partition is still on flash and at least in theory, you can repartition the whole flash to set the sizes of your partitions as you wish.

Re. the second point, I see what you mean now. It revolves around licensing for Google Play, not the open source version of Android. Though I understand that it wouldn't make sense to try to sell an Android device without Google Play.

I recently uninstalled tiktok from my phone because it was taking up 40% of my battery usage in a day even if I didn't use it and even though I turned background data off.

Step 1: Turn on Facebook app.

Step 2: Put coffee cup on phone.

Step 3: Enjoy warm coffee all day

Because android sms is unencrypted and not compatible with most other message platforms. Most users I know resort to what apps, signal, WeChat, or others. WhatsApp is just the most common and most relevant for this conversation. What do you use for messaging?

My last Samsung was the s5 I really hated it towards the end… battery would die with in a few hours and it was 1 year old phone. Switch to apple and never got facebook again… now i use my phones 2-3 years

Strict no Meta accounts policy at my house. Facebook is the Fox News of social media and Instagram is engineered to drive up teen suicide rates. It’s all shit technology authored by sociopaths. No thanks. No surprise they would fire anyone with a modicum of ethics.

Plot twist, they were trying to get Ember out of business.

Never been on fecalbook! No wonder the battery lasted so long on my phone!

Facebook does drain the battery…

New lifespan for real life!

Secretly? Everyone knew about it. I was developing mobile apps when this happened, and all of us developers knew. Facebook Messenger burned through my phone's battery so hard that it actually burned my leg. (Was winter... Phone was wrapped under pants, snow pants, long sweater, heavy jacket... And when insulated like that it burned.)

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That’s not how things work in real life.

Tests in “a lab” don’t represent reality, and every single company on earth expands testing to users to get real data.

That’s why new features are rolled out and not just appear for all users at once.

The first paragraph you quoted does not come from the document, it just describes what negative tests are.

The second refers to a document titled “how to..” and the only description of it is “it contains examples of tests”… he says “it’s the most horrible document I ever read”, so I’d expect him to describe what was so horrible in it… a test of loading an image that drained the battery faster? Jesus Christ! The children! The horror!!!

I just text. Yea it sucks about videos, but it's not that big a deal. There are other methods. I don't use any of those mentioned tho.

Deliberately draining battery is a "feature"? I hope that in some countries, this will be treated as a malicious activity with possible investigation from authorities. How is this different from unauthorised use of computing resources.

Really what if you have no service but you do have internet? Like on a plane or in a house with Wi-Fi but no service or traveling internationally? How do you group chats, share images, or feel confident your messages are going through at all or read? Just thinking of raw dogging sms stresses me out

I don't tend to use group chats often. I hate them, actually. Phones send thru wifi, so that's not an issue. I also send goofy stuff thru Snapchat or FB messenger. I hate Facebook, but I'm also not going to get rid of it...

It’s not. This is exactly the problem with the article, it takes something that’s a normal procedure and makes it sound evil to people who don’t understand it.

In a “lab” I can test a change to my app on 30 devices maybe. 100 maybe if I have a bigger budget.

But still, with thousands of devices out there and an infinite amount of setups I can’t predict all the different ways a change to any piece of code can affect every single user.

As evil as Facebook are (and they are), they have ZERO interest in draining your battery. The opposite is true.

So when they create a new feature, or even make a change to something you don’t even notice about the app (I.e. the method in which images are loaded) - instead of releasing it to everyone - they release it to some… if the effect is negative, yes, these few users get fucked, but then the code is fixed, without fucking every single user.

So for example if Facebook finds a way to make images load faster, which is for the benefit of all users, one thing they need to do is make sure it doesn’t drain the battery too fast - because that would defeat the purpose.

They can’t just test it in the lab. They need to make sure it works well even if the device is on low battery mode, low/high brightness, with open apps in the background, and without, and so on and so on and so on for every single device.

It would be so funny if that app was what caused the exploding batteries.

I use an S20 which uses hardware authentication to check for a locked bootloader.

I thought you wanted for how the system partition worked. That sizes are chipset dependent, is just experience. I'd suggest reading a lot on xda but I can't point to anything specific.

About selling without google play. Well, huawei is doing so, so you can, they have their own store. It's just not all that popular.

I am not sure. If they release a feature and that drains the battery by accident, then yes, they can be forgiven. In this case, it seems they knew it would drain the battery and still released the feature. Apple did similar wuth deliberately slowing down the OS and was fined. I hope the internal training document is revealed during the trial for us to know.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate#:~:text=The%20investigation%20concluded%20in%20November,about%20how%20it%20throttles%20performance.

That's impossible in Europe unfortunately. Damn WhatsApp..

Fecebook

It’s really unclear from the article since the contents of the document and the guide are not described (other than “horrible”), as well as the scale of the tests.

Most likely the document contains standard procedures.

Eh I got a S22Ultra and it never came with Meta/Facebook anything. Surprisingly, it had actually fewer bloat apps than I expected.

Um you can text over wifi? You go into the settings and there's a toggle to use WiFi for text rather than cell service. I don't have whatsapp or wechat. I use 96% text, 2% discord, and 2% steam chat with the app.

Their negative testing worked. I unisralled the app long time ago

This happened back in 2012 or 2013 on one of the FB app releases. I remember bc a friend had just gotten their first iPhone, a 3GS, and the battery kept draining. Nothing but stock apps and FB were installed on it.

Went to Apple to get it replaced and the same thing happened to the replacement phone. Apple replaced it again, and it did the same thing.

Apple ended up giving them an iPhone 4 and it still kept on happening. Once he removed FB, the battery issue disappeared. Years later, we find out about that inaudible audio file playing in the background and was legit the same timeframe of his battery issues.

I did it and I am still alive, therefore it works!

Whenever a new technology comes onto the market, like a new programming language or framework, if it's developed by Facebook I steer clear.

rooting your phone/unlocking the bootloader is VERY different from what people usually consider an "unlocked phone".

"locked" / "unlocked" in this regard is just about carrier locks like they are common in the US. Buying a phone through a carrier and the phone only working on that carriers network and it coming with preinstalled apps and receiving its updates through the carrier.

Buying a phone off for example amazon on the other hand will (afaik, in my country locked phones are illegal) have the phone "unlocked" -> not locked to any carrier -> only the "Samsung" preinstalled apps on it.
This will NOT trigger any KNOX protection like rooting your phone would, so your banking apps and yes the McDonalds app will work perfectly fine.

>Because android sms is unencrypted

No. SMS are simply not encrypted regardless of whether you send them from an iOS device or an android device.

If you message on an android phone with someone else with an android phone it wont use standard SMS but instead use RCS and this is encrypted.

This is the same as using an iPhone with iMessage when texting another device supporting iMessage. The fact that iPhones and Androids don't have encrypted texts between them is due to Apple not supporting RCS fully.

Well that headline de-escalated quickly...

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Real talk. He sucks.

Yup. Don't give them camera permissions.

I thought my battery was dying!! Looks like it wasnt. I'm wondering how many people who are political were being targeted?

I wonder how many people affected by this were targeted by Facebook for their political views? It would totally go along with their motive of total control of social media messaging... Sigh.

You don't understand Batterygate either, probably because it's been so misreported on Reddit.

Batteries cannot consistently provide max voltage as they age. In order to prevent your phone from shutting down randomly - say, during a 911 call - they make the processor stay within the minimum voltage that the battery can provide.

Yes, it should have been an option, but most customers should leave this feature enabled anyways if they want a stable experience and a reliable phone.

“ Facebook secretly killed users batteries, worker claims in lawsuit”

Facebook almost certainly helped kill some of their users, by favoring misleading horseshit, in their algorithms, since it lead to more engagement for them.

why, im in EU too.. just told all my real friends to install signal/telegram

They uninstalled all those useless apps for me when I bought my phone. So glad!

It’s from the NY Post. That’s how every article is.

The real lesson is that tabloids sometimes have legitimate-sounding names.

Thanks for the info. Come to think of it, the Amazon Fire tablets are also Android devices sold without Google Play.

are you asking me?

This helped me figure out that Imgur refused to close. Great feature.

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I’m tired of hearing about Meta when there are so many companies doing way worse shit. Meta is in a chokehold right now and is so closely observed because of the actual past fuckups that they can’t really get away with much. People love to just glom onto Meta and use it as a scapegoat but holy shit TikTok ACTUALLY steals your data and no one cares. If meta was doing that today people would lose their shit, but no one cares about TikTok? Or how poorly Apple treats their factory workers? I would love to actually rip apart some of these other companies. Meta is like a hornet with its wings cut off. Boring and old.

Uninstalled FB and Messenger almost 10 years ago. It's liberating

No. It's more of a sarcastic question mark. Because I already described how you can do it. That or you can't read worth a damn.

Thank you fam. Saying no to doing that test was the easiest decision of my career fam. The Lord Always Delivers! All data scientists in the world will back me up on this one.

Exactly. And look at how many NPCs here jumped on the 15 minutes of hate bandwagon in these comments.

Keep this in mind whenever you notice someone being vilified on this site.

I’m sorry can someone tell me why they were doing this to the battery life?

This is incredibly obnoxious. I’m still on Facebook because we don’t live near our families and our kids’ schools and teams use it to communicate, and any time I’m on Facebook it shuts down Spotify, which wouldn’t be as terrible if any notifications I received after that point weren’t deafeningly loud.

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Been trying to find more on this as well, and every article is the same. No claims that they did this to real users, no explanations on what they would be testing or why they'd be testing it live. Just some vague quotes to stir up drama and get clicks, then get a ton of engagement from people commenting "I knew it was killing my battery!"

I agree actually.

Anything you catch Meta doing, it’s safe to assume tik tok is doing in a worse way.

Ironically Apple present themselves as the heroes of privacy, but are actually allowing Tik Tok to do thing it won’t allow Facebook to do, just because they are Facebook as a competitor

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Did they actually switch ?