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Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

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61–70 of 376 posts

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#61

But all of the engineers passed LeetCode, how could this be?

Facebook engineering generally is super competent. Leet code or not, such slip ups are bound to happen from time to time. True test of competence would be these mistakes don't repeat and that they learn from it, which I'm pretty sure they would.

That’s not a slip up on their end, it’s a feature to enable them to collect stuff even if you don’t use their code.

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#62
post #45

Perhaps this outage will raise awarenesses more broadly as to the prevalence of "non essential" third party SDKs like these, and the risk that their failure can significantly impact on the wider ecosystem. I can't imagine Apple will be all too pleased by this. Perhaps time for them to look at clamping down on SDKs that make remote network requests? (Given they have their own private sign in system now as well, they m…

Not likely. FB has made it too easy, and developers are lazy. For the marketing/sales/PR types of the company that made the app, the info the SDK returns is exactly the type of information they want/need. At the end of the day, the "morality" of a developer will always come second to the sales/marketing/PR people. After all, you're just a developer, and there's a line a mile long of people waiting to replace you.

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#63
post #12

Why is facebook spyware part of Spotify. I signed up to Spotify via email not facebook login.

i mean, they offer FB sign in in the app, so the FB SDK is bundled with the app binary. looks like the mere presence of the library is causing crashes. someone on a related GH thread noted they commented out the code invoking the FB SDK but the issue remained.

Yes, requiring the SDK to implement Facebook Login is the decision that's being criticized. Facebook encourages SDK usage obviously for the data collection it enables, but even they provide an OAuth-only login flow that doesn't require the SDK at all: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/manually...

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#64
post #45

Perhaps this outage will raise awarenesses more broadly as to the prevalence of "non essential" third party SDKs like these, and the risk that their failure can significantly impact on the wider ecosystem. I can't imagine Apple will be all too pleased by this. Perhaps time for them to look at clamping down on SDKs that make remote network requests? (Given they have their own private sign in system now as well, they m…

Yes, please.

Firebase should be next, requiring you to include a whole bunch of Firebase lib crap just to use Crashlytics.

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#66

But all of the engineers passed LeetCode, how could this be?

the product manager began telling engineers to "do the needful" gotta localize the English to get the point across

Facebook doesn't seem like the kind of company that would be outsourcing their SDK development to some random Indian outsourcing firm stuffed with graduates from second-tier engineering schools that don't know their : from their ;

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#67
post #24

Zoom dodged this bullet.

And got so much flak for it. How much "zomg you're spying on me" press are the other 50% of the iOS ecosystem going to receive for doing the same thing Zoom did, going on a decade.

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#68
post #52
post #36

For those wondering why the Facebook SDK is so widely used in popular mobile apps: Facebook Login is actually in the minority of reasons to add the Facebook SDK to your mobile app. The vast majority of apps will add the Facebook SDK because it contains Facebook App Ads; a library that "completes the circle" in terms of finding out how effectively the ads you ran on Facebook were at getting people to download, install…

>Is that "spyware"? Yes, absolutely. It uses energy and bandwidth I paid for to surreptitiously transmit my information for use which will solely benefit Facebook and the software developer.

That definition is rather too broad. It makes basically everything spyware which dilutes the word too much to be useful.

Re: Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More

#70
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then if this can be fixed by a server side change as suggested below, that's worrisome, since it suggests it is communicating with FB even if you don't invoke it.

the real question though is if the library is not even imported into the main app and just left hanging around, linked, would it still crash? i'd be curious to know

Apparently yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097887
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