Bug In The Sony Crackle App Could Kill Your Battery

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If you liked what you read just a couple days ago about Crackle, and liked the thought of having access to huge amounts of Sony content, including some stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else, then you might well have downloaded the relevant app giving you access to the mobile version on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. But there’s a bug in the app that you’ll need to keep an eye on, lest it kill your battery.

The bug in question starts when Crackle asks to keep track of your location. Innocent enough, you figure–lots of apps do that–but this one is different. When you’re done watching the Crackle content, and shut down the app, Crackle carries right on tracking your location, meaning that it’s also pulling juice from the battery to support said tracking.

There’s a fairly easy fix for this bug, though: all you’ll need to do is either refuse it tracking capability from the beginning (if you haven’t already given it permission to track), or if you have already given that permission, just go into the settings menu on your iOS device, select “location services”, and deny it access from there.

It’s a really rather minor bug–on a scale of “one” to “Skynet” it’s about a two–but it could pose some inconvenience and unexpected battery drain if you’re not careful, so keep that in mind. Most are looking for this bug to be taken care of relatively quickly in a future update, not to mention some outside nod to getting Airplay included in the support so you can stream all that sweet Crackle content onto your big screen (and indeed, there’s a lot of sweet Crackle content in there–I told a friend of mine about it just a couple nights ago who was terribly happy to note that minisodes of the old Godzilla cartoon series was in there. You know, the one from the nineties that ran on Fox for a while?).

So if you’ve already got the app, you’ll likely want to keep an eye on its location capabilities, and if you’re still planning to, you’ll want to know about that right up front.