While it’s pretty much evident that Facebook app is one of the hardware and resource-intensive ones that you must be using on your smartphone, and it undoubtedly eats into phone’s battery at great extent, it doesn’t slow down or hang on older smartphones. In case you’re thinking a lot about how it manages to do all these great things like many others, Facebook engineers have recently explained what makes it possible for them to implement such sweet little things that benefit their users.
‘Facebook’s Mobile Device Lab is the reason its apps keep functioning on older phones,’ The Verge explains. It notes that Facebook keeps performance track of its software running on older phones to figure out if it’s new code is causing any problem or affecting battery performance on older devices. That’s how Facebook team ensures smooth performance of its mobile apps 24/7.
“In total, Facebook has almost 2,000 handsets used to tell developers when they’ve screwed something up, and whether that degradation is only noticeable on an older phone,” The Verge story quoted Antoine Reversat, part of Facebook’s production engineering team, as saying.
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According to the report, Facebook Mobile Device Lab works with around 60 server racks. Each of its racks deals with 32 devices, running a version of one of the company’s many applications available for mobile devices.
“When a developer makes a change, we build a new version of the app. We then install it here on one of the devices and check that the change didn’t introduce regressions,” Reversat was quoted saying further.
The best part, Facebook engineers take each and every small aspect into consideration and try not to compromise any most trivial possibilities. According to company engineers, it’s very much possible that even a small piece of code may result in miserable situations, and most importantly, battery consumption.
