I disagree. While, yes, Facebook needs to test their SDK, app developers need to build resiliency into their apps to ensure third party dependencies don’t break their app. The developer adopted it into their app; it’s their responsibility to do the proper checks in cases like these where Facebook broke things on their end.
So how could the app developers have prevented this, other then not using the SDK? (I'm not advocating for using the SDK.)
Would disabling SDK autoinit have fixed this? That was a suggestion raised back in March. Seems like a net win to avoid static initializers in the first place.
(Am not a mobile dev, but it wasn't exactly hard to find that, either).
Yes, it's definitely time for some slightly enhanced armchair activism! Convert all active whatsapp contacts to signal? 80%? 50%? Same for Facebook messenger! It needs to be uncomfortable enough - if they want to communicate with us and are minimally tech savvy ("click link to install app") they have to switch to signal . That's it. I'm starting to send out messages over my morning coffee. Let's do this together: htt…
I’d rather keep using messenger than switch to signal. Nothing that requires my phone number, and even worse, uses it as primary identifier, is something I want to switch to (and no, obviously I don’t use Whatsapp either). I realize that in this mobile-centric world that makes me a grumpy old man, but for me, my E-Mail is the important ID.
I'm a core contributor at Status, and the team I'm on is currently developing a desktop client[1] to complement the mobile client. We have alpha builds for Linux and macOS, and soon Windows.
The most popular apps on one of the most popular operating systems just plainly don't even open. What has this industry become? How are we so goddamn inept at writing software? This is an industry where we can automate testing - not many other industries have this capability - and we still don't have a simple test regime of "check if the app opens" for any of those apps. Somehow, at the most valuable software compani…
The apps are broken serverside by Facebook. No amount of testing (automated or not) on the side of the app developers would have prevented this. Facebook's own apps did not break since they are on the latest version of FBSDK. What Facebook needs to do is to test whether their changes don't break other people's apps.
It is not acceptable to have your client crash due to server-side stuff going on. When the server is faulty the client must handle that gracefully, like disabling the functionality or displaying a message about what is wrong if no further use is possible due to the error.
It's not acceptable. None of the apps broken on my phone require Facebook features for core functionality. Downtime happens, but downtime due to your non-essential & user-hostile ads/tracking/social SDK? These companies deserve every single cent of lost revenue.
If the last time this happens is anything to go by, a lot of apps have the FBSDK to facilitate their "Log In with Facebook" functionality. The issue is that you have to include a monolithic SDK that initialises itself without your control just for simple functionality like that. IMO, blame Facebook.
Blame both of them. I'm done with Spotify after this. I'm heading over to Apple Music.
It's a total joke that an app would crash on startup because of this idiocy.
The most popular apps on one of the most popular operating systems just plainly don't even open. What has this industry become? How are we so goddamn inept at writing software? This is an industry where we can automate testing - not many other industries have this capability - and we still don't have a simple test regime of "check if the app opens" for any of those apps. Somehow, at the most valuable software compani…
Bugs happen. Tests miss edge cases. Shit happens.
This will be a fart in the wind and lessons will be learned.
I installed iOS 14 beta today and got mad at Apple because I thought the update broke so many apps on my phone. Turns out it was FB sdk coincidentally. One more reason to be mad at FB.
I disagree. While, yes, Facebook needs to test their SDK, app developers need to build resiliency into their apps to ensure third party dependencies don’t break their app. The developer adopted it into their app; it’s their responsibility to do the proper checks in cases like these where Facebook broke things on their end.
This is a native SDK that is crashing the process. There is nothing an app developer can responsibly do to prevent or recover from this crash. Other than remove the SDK, of course.
It's a money game and Apple could totally crack down it, but they won't. They may long term but they take cowardly slow steps like everyone else does.
So exactly how much money does Apple make from free apps? If Apple wanted to make money , it should make it harder for advertising supported apps to make money and force apps to either not exist or get people to pay for them. I would be okay with that.
I guess Apple will have to weigh whether they'll want to tolerate the Fb app on iOS, but more probably they have a deal with Fb (else they would've kicked them out already). Considering Fb is said to be the main portal for "the web" as a Fb user might see it (which I find still very hard to believe for a number of reasons), if the Fb app (or worse, WhatsApp) isn't on iOS, with Safari and FF already blocking most tracking on facebook.com, Fb might block Apple devices altogether, and Apple might or might not stand to loose in device sales, depending on the intersection of Apple's with Fb's target demographic. If it were only for Spotify (which is a direct competitor to Apple Music), they'll have to weigh whether them kicking Spotify out will be seen as anti-competitive vs having a good excuse for eliminating a competitor on their own platform. But maybe my speculations are way off, and Apple will just tell Fb to fix their shit.
The most popular apps on one of the most popular operating systems just plainly don't even open. What has this industry become? How are we so goddamn inept at writing software? This is an industry where we can automate testing - not many other industries have this capability - and we still don't have a simple test regime of "check if the app opens" for any of those apps. Somehow, at the most valuable software compani…
Years ago, I had one of the employee builds on my company phone, and it picked up an update and would "instacrash" - tap the icon, and it'd die immediately. Crash. Crash. Crash. A couple of days later I caught up with the people allegedly responsible for this stuff in the bigger review meeting. "Shouldn't you open a SEV because you are shipping stuff that can't possibly work and aren't catching it pre-release?" The r…
Curiously, this type of handwavy response reveals a not-quite-1:1 mapping between the sort of assertive, pro-admission, fail-forward balance that "move fast, break things" implies for me, and the apparent reality which seems closer to "haha crowdsourced QC go brrrrt"
That's amateur hour stuff. Every developer in pretty much every language or platform learns VERY quickly what happens when you don't do a null check.
NSNull is not the null you think
It may not be a conventional null, but I'm not aware of any tech where calling "count" on a Null, .nil? or otherwise null-like construct won't end horribly.