It has now been three weeks since the change from no longer having a FaceBook app installed on my phone (see previous post: Switching from FaceBook App to Web Site Only). After three weeks, I am still loving the change. Now, I have not noticed a huge change in battery levels for the phone where it lasts all day or even an extra 15-20% of the day, but it has improved how I use the phone for FaceBook activity. The change has allowed the ability to be more connected with FaceBook contacts and not feel as tethered to my phone each time the alert went off with a notification.
Notifications
The first thing I did a few days after going to no app on the phone was to enable email notifications for various events on FaceBook. I still wanted to know when an event happened, but not necessarily receive it on the phone as a notification. Instead, I wanted to change it so that those notices would come through via email instead. Making this change to a no-app phone allowed me to control which notifications (via email) I see and how I interact with those notifications.
The other improvement by making this change has been notifications through the web site via the phone. When a lot of notifications would be received on the app, the FaceBook app would display all notifications including those that had already been viewed. It would take a while to scroll through the list and look at each notification. With the web access, this is no longer a problem. It only displays those events which have not been viewed. Thus, if there are ten notifications, only those ten are displayed making it very easy to see each notice. I have had has many as twenty-five notifications since changing to this method and even with as many as 25 notifications, it was very easy to get through the entire list.
This is an improvement if you ask me as it is event difficult to see which notifications have been checked access FaceBook on a computer. Any notification is displayed and scrolling has to be done to get through the list sometimes and difficult to see which ones have been read or not. Possibly a setting that can be changed, but nothing I ever found to make notifications work better in the app and only display those that had not been viewed.
Future Use
For now, I plan on continuing to use this method to access FaceBook. It is easy and not always reaching for my phone each time the alert goes off for FaceBook. Looking at notifications, I do see much higher notifications since going go this approach. It could be argued that is where the 15-20% battery increase comes in that now instead of reaching for the phone each time the alert goes off, I am now only reaching for the phone when there are many alerts. Or, by knowing what the alert is by reading it in email so I do not have to check each one as I would with the regular alerts.
What Has Been Your Experience
Have you done this switch? What have you experienced since making the change and removing the app? Share your experience in the comments or why you switched back to the app.