[otherme123]

You want to test your app in negative scenarios, and one of them is "when and how to fail gracefully when battery is extremely low".

My phone rarely goes below 10%, and maybe it has seen 5% one or two times. If Facebook waits for that, they will never run the tests. But if they detect my battery is at 10%, then drain it to 3%, launch the controlled failure testing, then drain the phone to complete shutdown, on the next boot they have their very valuable data.

[foldr]

Or...buy some phones and run the tests yourself.

[otherme123]

You could buy 100 iphones... Or you could "borrow" a million for free, to get rock solid stats.

Also there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different phone models. The allegedly used way of negative testing is much better than buying phones, and is virtually free.

[pawelmurias]

"Borrowing" a million phones and draining their battery down would make increase the perception of your app draining batteries. Seems pretty dubious if you would be willing to do that just to get a bit better low battery prices.

[foldr]

I think Facebook Can afford to buy thousands of different phone models (and presumably already does?)

Handling low battery states isn’t exactly rocket science anyway. Do less computation. The rest is up to the OS.

[isleyaardvark]

It's also unethical.

[otherme123]

Coming from a business whom founder said: "I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SMS... People just submitted it. I don't know why. They trust me. Dumb f**s", ethical considerations has zero weight here.

[mantas]

Running that on end-user phones sounds wrong on so many levels.