Facebook opens all public posts to search – and fixes its battery-killing iOS app
Got something you don't want to share with the world? Time to lock it down
Considering how much many of us live our lives through Facebook these days, even seemingly minor changes and fixes can have a significant impact. And here are two fresh examples of how.
Yesterday, Facebook updated its search functionality to include all public posts shared by all users since its inception – more than two trillion of them, collectively. While that means you’ll more quickly be able to, say, find trending news stories or perhaps info on events, it also means that anything public you’ve shared is now way easier to find.
Did you just feel a pit in your stomach? Yeah, that means you might’ve shared something you don’t want to be in the world’s view. Luckily, you can always go back and adjust your privacy settings, and Wired has a tutorial for how to do that quickly and efficiently.
Elsewhere, the social networking juggernaut made a pretty significant fix on the mobile side of things. The most recent iOS app update was apparently shredding many users’ iPhone and iPad batteries, which became very apparent thanks to iOS 9’s app-by-app percentage breakdown listing. Luckily, Facebook isolated the issues and made improvements for a new update out yesterday, although the problems aren’t fully resolved.
One cause was a "CPU spin," in which a request would just keep procession without an eventual resolution, while another had to do with audio session errors. Facebook says it’ll keep updating the app regularly to improve battery life. In the meantime, kudos to Apple for forcing the issue with the extra battery details in iOS 9.
[Sources: Facebook Newsroom, Wired, Facebook]
Andrew Hayward
Freelance Writer 
