11–20 of 129 posts
Annoyingly easy to discredit this article as a disgruntled former-employee trying to stick it to Facebook/Meta. I'm no fan of Facebook, seriously. But it's hard to take an article like this at face value. Was he fired for not doing his job, and his grievance was a reframed legitimate problem (IE doing data analysis in the background will run down the battery)? Was he just laid off during this most recent round of lay…
What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.
What testing?
The claim in TFA is they run a/b style tests where a sample group would have their battery deliberately drained to test performance of the app in low-power situations. Based on the general fixation on tests at Meta and Alphabet et al, it seems pretty plausible to me that they might try such a thing although: 1) the article is just the employee's claims in the context of employment arbitration, rather than evidence. F…
::: ::: domain 'phonearena.com' in active blocklist ::: + phonearena.com
Any thoughts!!?
Edit: Is there a good site or script to run through the Adblock lists, check them and report the location of matches?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The claim in TFA is they run a/b style tests where a sample group would have their battery deliberately drained to test performance of the app in low-power situations. Based on the general fixation on tests at Meta and Alphabet et al, it seems pretty plausible to me that they might try such a thing although: 1) the article is just the employee's claims in the context of employment arbitration, rather than evidence. F…
Exactly, why don't just wait, this would make no sense from a risk rewards perspective
My phone rarely goes below 10%, and maybe it has seen 5% one or two times. If Facebook waits for that, they will never run the tests. But if they detect my battery is at 10%, then drain it to 3%, launch the controlled failure testing, then drain the phone to complete shutdown, on the next boot they have their very valuable data.
I miss the part that explains WHY they would drain a battery. What kind of outcome has this test?
so you run a test where you intentionally consume more of some cohort of users' battery power (you could have several cohorts where you consume more and more power, even). and you look to see if the rate at which your app is deleted/force-quit by the cohorts with more power usage goes up. if it does then you can assume that you're overdoing the battery drain. if it doesn't then you can assume users don't really care (or don't care enough; maybe they're unhappy but your app is too important to them to delete).
why this could be useful is when you're deciding what to prioritize - if you've got data saying that users don't care about excessive battery consumption and they'll keep using the app anyway, you can argue against optimizing for battery life in future development, presumably letting your developers do things faster/more lazily. or, it could show that battery life is super important and be a valuable argument to prioritize power optimization work in the name of keeping your users from jumping ship.
personally i'd rather just presume that battery life is important and that optimizing for efficient use of our users' batteries is the right thing to do, regardless of hard data, but i'm sure there are people out there that think differently.
Annoyingly easy to discredit this article as a disgruntled former-employee trying to stick it to Facebook/Meta. I'm no fan of Facebook, seriously. But it's hard to take an article like this at face value. Was he fired for not doing his job, and his grievance was a reframed legitimate problem (IE doing data analysis in the background will run down the battery)? Was he just laid off during this most recent round of lay…
What is the point this comment is trying to make ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, why don't just wait, this would make no sense from a risk rewards perspective
You want to test your app in negative scenarios, and one of them is "when and how to fail gracefully when battery is extremely low". My phone rarely goes below 10%, and maybe it has seen 5% one or two times. If Facebook waits for that, they will never run the tests. But if they detect my battery is at 10%, then drain it to 3%, launch the controlled failure testing, then drain the phone to complete shutdown, on the ne…
I couldn't get to phonearena.com, and when I checked it's in one of the default lists used by Adblocker on OpenWrt (adaway, adguard, disconnect, yoyo): ::: ::: domain 'phonearena.com' in active blocklist ::: + phonearena.com Any thoughts!!? Edit: Is there a good site or script to run through the Adblock lists, check them and report the location of matches?