351–360 of 446 posts
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Ban it from where? Using their API?
Yes, Facebook requires that any mobile app using Facebook login do so via their SDK. Presumably they will disable your Facebook app (breaking login) if you don’t comply.
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> I'm pretty sure that's the same agreement that every developer has with Google just by writing an android app and using Google APIs. But why would WhatsApp store it unencrypted on Google Drive, and encrypted (without giving you any access to the key) on your own SD card or local backup? It makes no sense. Except ... Google and Facebook have agreed that WhatsApp stores the database unencrypted, and in return Google…
I think this statement is being misunderstood by a lot of people here. The Google Drive backup is most likely still encrypted, just not "end to end" because the key needs to be stored on a Facebook server. That makes a lot more sense to me.
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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.
The truth is, 1st-party apps are well-supported but 3rd-party SDKs provided by these companies, especially the ones don't generate revenues (Facebook SDK, and many others) are simply not well-supported within the organization. They are not dogfooded, they don't develop with the latest and greatest tools available for 1st-party apps, some of them have very spotty CI, and often their release schedule is not as rigorous…
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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.
Maybe look into Status? https://status.im/ 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. Status uses the Waku[2] protocol. [1] https://github.com/status-im/nim-status-client/releases [2] https://specs.vac.dev/specs/waku/waku.html
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I’m curious why you see a difference between the two? Phone companies have been giving away your phone number for years, it gets more spam then my email address at this point, which has made me disable it for all incoming calls except those in my contacts. At this point, none of us even use phones, my family pretty much use Zoom and at work everything is Google Meet, my phone function is basically a dead function at…
I don't truly own my phone number. I barely control it. I can move it from provider to provider, kind of, but it's still not _my_ number – the number is a side effect of having cell service. In particular, if I move to a new country, what happens to my phone number? (Having recently done so, I still don't know: for now, I'm paying two cellphone bills, but that's obviously not a long-term solution, and I don't know wh…
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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 curious why you see a difference between the two? Phone companies have been giving away your phone number for years, it gets more spam then my email address at this point, which has made me disable it for all incoming calls except those in my contacts. At this point, none of us even use phones, my family pretty much use Zoom and at work everything is Google Meet, my phone function is basically a dead function at…
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That's very interesting. Does Android have anything similar?
NetGuard. Creates a local VPN through which the internet is routed. Shows the domains each app is accessing, can be blocked per app, or forbid internet at system level (breaks things, require fine tuning). Also you can configure a non standard DNS (like adguard, which can block some things at the DNS level). EDIT: or NextDNS, since it comes with some additional features.
Netguard by the same dev behind Xpirvacy, which provides dummy data to apps that try to send back all sorts of unique identifiers to the mothership (+apps like facebook).
Most popular apps call facebook IPs at launch, along with other analytics services. It's quite disgusting.
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.
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…
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
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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.
Bingo! App developer voluntarily pulled in a dependency which they didn't fully understand. When you bring in a dependency, it's not still someone else's code/problem, it becomes your problem.