Facebook’s Android and iPhone apps still aren’t great. The both apps has had bugs that cause it to drain battery in the background, they consume your mobile data, takes a lot of your space and can equally make your phone slow.
Rather than put up with the awful app, you can use Facebook’s fairly full-featured mobile site instead. Add the website to your home screen and you can launch it in one tap, just like the app. On Android, you can even get push notifications from Facebook via Up browser, Mozilla Firefox, Opera mobile, Google Chrome. And if that weren’t enough, you can send and receive messages on the mobile site — without having to download Facebook Messenger!
For chrome browser, head to facebook.com in your web browser app and sign in. When you first visit the website, you’ll be informed that Facebook wants to send you notifications. Tap “Allow” and you’ll get Facebook notifications via Google Chrome. This feature will only work in Google Chrome, at least for now, so you’ll need Chrome as your web browser to use it. You can also try it out on other great browsers.
If you change your mind later, and don’t want notifications, you can tap the menu button in Chrome, tap “Settings,” tap “Site settings” under Advanced, tap “Notifications,” and remove the notification permission from m.facebook.com.
How to disable or uninstall the app from your Android phone, you can generally locate the Facebook app icon in your app drawer, long-press it, and drag it to a trash icon or something similar to uninstall it. This may work differently on different phones, depending on the customizations your manufacturer made to your phone’s version of Android. If this doesn’t work, open the Settings page, tap the “Apps” category, tap the “Facebook” app, and tap “Uninstall”.
If there is no “Uninstall” button, it’s likely because your manufacturer preinstalled it on your phone, and you aren’t allowed to uninstall it. A “Disable” button should appear here instead, though; tap that to disable the app instead.
Sure, this is an old tip, but it’s amazing how many people are still struggling with Facebook’s app when there’s such a better option available. The mobile site looks almost exactly like the app, and with modern mobile web browsers faster than ever, the Facebook website is pretty snappy. Add in the ability to send messages and (on Android) push notifications, and this is a killer solution.
This also works for other social media services that provide half-decent mobile websites, of course. You could use this same process for Twitter, for example.
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