Facebook’s Android App could kill up to 20% of battery life

Complaints about Facebook’s Android app’s performance issues have been hovering around for a while now. Last year Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, went as far as making his employees switch from iPhones to Android in an attempt to get the problems solved faster.

Unfortunately however, the app is still rather sluggish. The issues caused Russell Holly, a blogger from Android Central, to uninstall the app from his phone and visit Facebook through Chrome. His performance issues vanished, and overall he was satisfied with his browser experience.

When seeing this, a user on Reddit, /u/pbrandes_eth, decided to investigate, and found that by removing the Facebook and Messenger apps from their phone, other apps would open 15% faster on average. Similarly, Samuel Gibbs from the Guardian removed only the Facebook app from his phone and began using Metal, an app that uses Facebook’s mobile website - he found that his phone had 20% more battery life.

While Facebook fixes their apps, if your employees are complaining about devices running slowly or having worse-than-usual battery life, it may be worth suggesting they remove Facebook apps. Certainly, if these are enterprise devices, some may wish to go so far as to blacklist apps that are known to cause poor performance.

Windows 10 is now the 2nd-most-popular OS

Windows 10 has overtaken XP and 8.1 to become the second-biggest operating system today, according to Net Market Share, as it is now being run on nearly 12% of PCs. Windows 7 is still the leading OS, holding 52% of the market.

The rapid growth of Windows 10 is yet to be met with any major disasters, which suggests that the operating system is with us for the long-term. Happily, Microsoft itself doesn’t seem to be sitting on the fence with this one either, having already released several major updates and committed huge budget and resources to encouraging people to switch.

The TalkTalk cyber attack cost the company £60m

TalkTalk have revealed in a trading update that an attack that allowed hackers access to the personal details of hundreds of thousands of their customers has cost the company £60 million, far exceeding the £35 million that they originally predicted.

This comes after the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) warned about the devastating impact data breaches can have on a company - not only in terms of financial damage, but also to a company’s brand and reputation.

Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, reiterated that, in addition to fines of up to £500,000, companies will also have to spend time, energy and money to rebuild consumer confidence, which can be more expensive than the fine itself.

This is reiterated by YouGov polls commissioned by the ICO, which found that nearly 80% of UK consumers would think twice about doing business with an online company that has failed to protect personal data.

If you have any doubts about the security of your data, it is certainly better to invest some money enhancing your protection now, than risk having to fork out gargantuan sums of money in the aftermath of a data breach and tarnishing your company’s reputation.