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What facebook needs to realize is that 2G is not the only factor because of which people don't use the facebook app. First of all the app takes too much resour

by aksx 11y ago

What facebook needs to realize is that 2G is not the only factor because of which people don't use the facebook app. First of all the app takes too much resources and makes the phone sluggish, especially on low end phones which are very common here. (Messenger is big offender here) I believe one of the reasons why whatsapp became so popular was that it was faster to use than facebook's messenger and you could easily delete media to save storage. People prefer using facebook on Opera Mini on their iPhones and android phones than using it from the app.

zamalek 11y ago
> whatsapp Whatsapp is just as bad. Disallowing it from running in the background extends my battery life from under a day to over 2 days. Why are these messaging apps so resource hungry?
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  I know all of this thanks to an old lecture I once attended (not a phone dev), so my information might be a bit off and outdated, but in broad strokes: it's partially due to naive programming practices, but phone manufacturers are also somewhat to blame. Every app has to poll for new messages on their own. That means opening up a connection just to see if something new is there. To give an analogy that's easy to grasp: imagine a giant sluice, big enough to fit two oil tankers. Opening a connection is like sending boats through it, the boats are the data, and the water is the power used each time. Now this sluice is a bit funny: once you operate it, it's very efficient and automatic, but it runs twenty times. In other words, you want have at least forty big-ass boats full of data to send through if you don't want to waste energy (to be clear, I just pulled these numbers out of the air; and in a real sluice that would be forty boats both ways, but internet connections are a bit different). Now imagine you just send a teeny tiny boat checking for new messages each time. If there's a message, data will be sent back (other boats). If not, due to how 2/3/4G work, the sluice will still open and close forty times. That'a s LOT of wasted water. It also takes time to operate the sluice. Not everyone who develops these apps is aware of this, so some naive app developers poll all the time. What would be amazing if the phone OS provided some sort of batching system where these polling messages would queue up, and it would connect for all of them at once. I dunno, maybe the newer phones have something like that.
  - aembleton 11y ago
    I think developers of large apps such as Whatsapp will be aware of this and will be aware of Google Cloud Messaging: https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/ https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/ This handles all aspects of regular polling so that adding more messaging applications shouldn't negatively affect the battery performance. Instead the application should be alerted and awoken if a relevant message is pushed to the device.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    There's a very informative XMPP XEP[1] with mobile considerations that touches on what you said (although that analogy of yours is great!). Where my problem lies is: even if I was the cleaner at Whatsapp or FB I'd be making noise about battery life, I'd do everything I could. Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost. It's not that hard to open a TCP connection, or heck, even a WebSocket. HTTP 1.1 is clearly the wrong application to use here. [1]: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#power http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#power
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      > Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost. Lack of accountability? All the complaints I hear about battery life are aimed at manufacturers, rather than the crap that we shovel on them and forget about. Facebook taking flak over their recent background audio problems was a rare exception.
      - vanderZwan 11y ago
        That's why AT&T (of all companies) has a team dedicated to teaching app developers how to make better behaving apps (the lecture I attended was by one of their guys).
      - zamalek 11y ago
        > Lack of accountability? Accountability comes with the functionality that allows you to see which apps are using battery. I recently upgraded to WP 10 and got a notification saying "some background apps are using a lot of battery," which is how I became aware of the culprit. That notification is a very smart idea and I hope to see it at some point on Android/iPhone.
- ice303 11y ago
  I'm on 4G network, and with a not so bad mobile pone. Huawei P8 lite (2Gb Ram). If i have facebook and messenger apps running, I can't get one day of battery life. Don't really understand why there apps are so power intensive.
pixelp3 11y ago
From what I read somewhere Facebook was making their mobile engineers use their app on older Androids (and maybe iPhones), which turned out to be very frustrating for them. I'm sure they are aware of the problem...
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Interesting. Maybe I'm using the wrong browser (default and Chrome), but one of the primary reasons I stick to the FB and Messenger apps is because the browser on my phone (Galaxy S4) basically kills the device. I prefer "sluggish" to "so slow that you want to throw your phone out of the window".

by aksx 11y ago

zamalek 11y ago

> whatsapp Whatsapp is just as bad. Disallowing it from running in the background extends my battery life from under a day to over 2 days. Why are these messaging apps so resource hungry?

vanderZwan 11y ago
I know all of this thanks to an old lecture I once attended (not a phone dev), so my information might be a bit off and outdated, but in broad strokes: it's partially due to naive programming practices, but phone manufacturers are also somewhat to blame. Every app has to poll for new messages on their own. That means opening up a connection just to see if something new is there. To give an analogy that's easy to grasp: imagine a giant sluice, big enough to fit two oil tankers. Opening a connection is like sending boats through it, the boats are the data, and the water is the power used each time. Now this sluice is a bit funny: once you operate it, it's very efficient and automatic, but it runs twenty times. In other words, you want have at least forty big-ass boats full of data to send through if you don't want to waste energy (to be clear, I just pulled these numbers out of the air; and in a real sluice that would be forty boats both ways, but internet connections are a bit different). Now imagine you just send a teeny tiny boat checking for new messages each time. If there's a message, data will be sent back (other boats). If not, due to how 2/3/4G work, the sluice will still open and close forty times. That'a s LOT of wasted water. It also takes time to operate the sluice. Not everyone who develops these apps is aware of this, so some naive app developers poll all the time. What would be amazing if the phone OS provided some sort of batching system where these polling messages would queue up, and it would connect for all of them at once. I dunno, maybe the newer phones have something like that.
- aembleton 11y ago
  I think developers of large apps such as Whatsapp will be aware of this and will be aware of Google Cloud Messaging: https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/ https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/ This handles all aspects of regular polling so that adding more messaging applications shouldn't negatively affect the battery performance. Instead the application should be alerted and awoken if a relevant message is pushed to the device.
- zamalek 11y ago
  There's a very informative XMPP XEP[1] with mobile considerations that touches on what you said (although that analogy of yours is great!). Where my problem lies is: even if I was the cleaner at Whatsapp or FB I'd be making noise about battery life, I'd do everything I could. Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost. It's not that hard to open a TCP connection, or heck, even a WebSocket. HTTP 1.1 is clearly the wrong application to use here. [1]: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#power http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#power
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    > Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost. Lack of accountability? All the complaints I hear about battery life are aimed at manufacturers, rather than the crap that we shovel on them and forget about. Facebook taking flak over their recent background audio problems was a rare exception.
    - vanderZwan 11y ago
      That's why AT&T (of all companies) has a team dedicated to teaching app developers how to make better behaving apps (the lecture I attended was by one of their guys).
    - zamalek 11y ago
      > Lack of accountability? Accountability comes with the functionality that allows you to see which apps are using battery. I recently upgraded to WP 10 and got a notification saying "some background apps are using a lot of battery," which is how I became aware of the culprit. That notification is a very smart idea and I hope to see it at some point on Android/iPhone.
ice303 11y ago
I'm on 4G network, and with a not so bad mobile pone. Huawei P8 lite (2Gb Ram). If i have facebook and messenger apps running, I can't get one day of battery life. Don't really understand why there apps are so power intensive.

pixelp3 11y ago

From what I read somewhere Facebook was making their mobile engineers use their app on older Androids (and maybe iPhones), which turned out to be very frustrating for them. I'm sure they are aware of the problem...

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Interesting. Maybe I'm using the wrong browser (default and Chrome), but one of the primary reasons I stick to the FB and Messenger apps is because the browser on my phone (Galaxy S4) basically kills the device. I prefer "sluggish" to "so slow that you want to throw your phone out of the window".