• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, October 23, 2015

You can shower people with ads, use their data for all sorts of secretive purposes, and split their service into a bunch of different apps. Just don’t mess with their phone’s battery life.

After learning that lesson the hard way, Facebook has issued a mea culpa, including a promise that its latest iOS app update will stop sucking the life out of users’ iPhones.

“We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused,” Ari Grant, Facebook’s engineering manager, says in a new blog post.

What was the issue? Well, it had nothing to do with the Location History feature, as was widely believed. Rather, Grant said it stemmed from the iOS app not being able to rest in the background of users’ phones, combined with the audio in videos that stream in users’ timelines.

“This repeated processing causes our app to use more battery than intended,” Grant admitted. “The app isn't actually doing anything while awake in the background, but it does use more battery simply by being awake.”

Considering that iPhone users have been grumbling about the battery issue since the release of iOS 9 in mid-September, you could fault Facebook for failing to act faster.

Still, I don’t imagine that most iPhone users will hold a grudge.