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No, neither of those are even remotely comparable.
I have edited my post to be more relevant to the discussion, see the last part.
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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…
None of the mentioned tests had anything to do with directly testing power drain or low-power performance. He just thinks they aren't giving enough weight to battery drain as an undesirable side effect of features that don't directly benefit the user. That's it. That's his whole gripe. They're testing how fast an image loads, that uses up the user's battery, and that's bad for the user.
If you believe former Facebook employee George Hayward, a data scientist, Facebook can secretly drain the battery on its users' cellphones on purpose.Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…
"load just one image across some small % of the user base" sounds harmless, especially while the app is open. Different world from intentional draining.
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Or...buy some phones and run the tests yourself.
You could buy 100 iphones... Or you could "borrow" a million for free, to get rock solid stats. Also there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different phone models. The allegedly used way of negative testing is much better than buying phones, and is virtually free.
This is curious. I've recently migrated to Pixel 7 Pro with GrapheneOS and noticed that my battery was lasting for about 6 hours. And there was nothing unusual in the battery usage report. Initially I thought that something is wrong with new Pixels or GrapheneOS. So, I've started reading ADB logs and assumed that something might be wrong with Meta apps - (which I installed in work profile). The logs were full of vari…
If you want to figure out what's going on with your battery, grab a bug report (adb bugreport command is one way). Then upload the resulting ZIP into battery historian - https://github.com/google/battery-historian (there's a hosted version somehwere on the web is you're willing to trust it with your debug data).
That will give you a usable graph of what's been keeping your phone awake, using radio and what the state of your signal quality was.
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Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…
My version: Hey, Apple is now blocking our ads. They will eat our lunch. What can we do about it? Hmm... Let's drain the batteries of iPhone users faster. They will switch to Android. What if we get caught? We'll just make up some story about A/B testing. Oh and drain some Android user's batteries too, for plausible deniability. Great plan, implement it!
Not caring about battery use? Yeah sure, even the enlightened developers of HN rarely give a crap about that.
Deliberately draining battery to force people to replace their phones? C'mon.
Not that I disbelieve the allegations, but the battery tracker on my phone consistently tells me that the largest consumer is Chrome, with Facebook Messenger somewhere way, way down the list. If they are bumping up battery consumption, either I've never been in the test group or they aren't bumping it enough to be a real risk.
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> You can make a negative case for any of the large tech company. Yes you can, but it's a spectrum. Microsoft abusing their monopolistic position to strangle competition and adding adware and spyware in an OS people pay for is ethically and morally bad, but is much less bad than Facebook profiting from and doing nothing to stop an actual active genocide. Facebook is by far the worst, ethically and morally, offender o…
And just went you think Facebook is the worst, TikTok comes around.
What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.
Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…
Anecdata: I pretty much never go on Facebook anymore and now my phone battery comfortably lasts all day. The current worst app on my phone is Duolingo, it guzzles 15% in about 15 mins and makes the phone noticeably hot. The most impressive app is Apple Music which feels like it should use a lot of battery but doesn’t.
Why would a music app use a lot of battery? Apple has been optimizing its hardware for over 20 years to play media efficiently.