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App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

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Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with all the daily (justified) outrage against FB/Google I struggle to understand why the community here is happy to applaud these companies for its innovation on specific projects or the work of specific engineers, ... whether it's project-zero or some fb framework we seem to be OK with praising their employees while at the same time hating how they use that innovation. some serious cognitive dissonace is going on -…

Have you ever worked at a large company? Really the only thing that groups the whole thing together is the legal entity. Different teams within the same company are essentially different companies once you reach a certain scale. I see no reason to disparage the good work one group does, because of a different group of people they've never met before, for no other reason than they share a CEO. A CEO that neither group…

this is a pretty simple way to absolve people of responsibility. Just because an institution has compartmentalized tasks, so that every single individual team appears to do nothing wrong, doesn't mean this actually absolves individuals, because following that logic obviously nobody would ever be responsible for anything.

It's like Kierkegaard's example of the mob who collectively intimidates but every member argues they have contributed virtually nothing, and so any sort of responsibility is simply dissolved.

Anyone who is responsible needs to be aware of the holistic system that they're part of and that they are enabling rather than just their own little world. That's no excuse.

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#382
post #64

Waze, a google owned app for the past 4 years, crashes because of the FB app. WhatsApp, a Facebook owned app, will not give you read access to your own chat database - it’s encrypted. But they have an arrangement with Google where it’s will back up unencrypted to your Google account (though, Google won’t let you retrieve it ... only the WhatsApp app can) Everything about this duopoly, their cooperation and lack of co…

You can download your chat backups as a readable archive file. If you have iCloud mounted, these files can be found in your iCloud folders. Or do you demand that any file under your control that contains chat should be accessible, rather than just one of them?

I have managed to extract the files from icloud but found that they are encrypted SQLite files. How do you access unencrypted whatsapp files?

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#383

They never responded to my request for a postmortem on the previous blunder: https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1385 .

Maybe if Facebook were actually required to provide post-mortems, the developers would be more cautious about creating these outages in the first place. One thing's for certain, the silence is infuriating.

Being "required" to provide post-mortems doesn't always mean they will actually do it.

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#384
post #3

That’s twice in as many months. They may need some better QA here although to be fair it does seem mostly people with an older SDK version based on the comments. But still. I guess they need to cotton onto whatever server side change happened and roll it back. At least this time you can disable the SDK (at least one app developer has a kill switch for the SDK) unlike the last issue that happened during code initialis…

> They may need some better QA There's no such thing as QA at Facebook. Really. Developers are supposedly responsible for all testing of their own code, but all of the pressure is to "move fast" so that goes about as well as you'd expect.

Looks like it's going pretty well, Facebook is currently worth 700 billion dollars. Or is that not what you meant?

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They may need some better QA There's no such thing as QA at Facebook. Really. Developers are supposedly responsible for all testing of their own code, but all of the pressure is to "move fast" so that goes about as well as you'd expect.

Looks like it's going pretty well, Facebook is currently worth 700 billion dollars. Or is that not what you meant?

There are multiple dimensions you can use to measure success. Market capitalization is certainly one of them, but it is at best only tenuously related to engineering quality.

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#386

Wonder if it was due to an expired or revoked certificate? Maybe the mass revocation of EV certs happening ~today is the trigger?

Who is revoking EV certs today?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/10/digicert_pulls_certs/

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#387

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…

>I have always been afraid of software engineering becoming a trade similar to medicine or law or (regular) engineering where significant barriers will be put up before you can enter the industry, but this sort of shit makes me feel like it could be for the better. I will have to go and get a degree, but that's the price I have to pay I guess.

I can almost guarantee that the programmer who wrote this had a degree and passed a very rigorous testing process to get their job at Facebook. Doesn't mean anything when the company tells them to cut corners to iterate faster.

Stop blaming engineers for the mistakes of management.

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#388
post #64

Waze, a google owned app for the past 4 years, crashes because of the FB app. WhatsApp, a Facebook owned app, will not give you read access to your own chat database - it’s encrypted. But they have an arrangement with Google where it’s will back up unencrypted to your Google account (though, Google won’t let you retrieve it ... only the WhatsApp app can) Everything about this duopoly, their cooperation and lack of co…

with all the daily (justified) outrage against FB/Google I struggle to understand why the community here is happy to applaud these companies for its innovation on specific projects or the work of specific engineers, ... whether it's project-zero or some fb framework we seem to be OK with praising their employees while at the same time hating how they use that innovation. some serious cognitive dissonace is going on -…

But technology is neutral and it's important to keep it that way. Giving into cancel culture and groupthink is the worst of things. Even worse that FB and Google.

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#389

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…

>I have always been afraid of software engineering becoming a trade similar to medicine or law or (regular) engineering where significant barriers will be put up before you can enter the industry, but this sort of shit makes me feel like it could be for the better. I will have to go and get a degree, but that's the price I have to pay I guess. I can almost guarantee that the programmer who wrote this had a degree and…

Yeah it's not like most programmers wouldn't prefer to be writing good software but the "let the user test it" cycle of quick turnaround sprint culture is always going to have this issue.

Re: App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m

#390
post #64

Waze, a google owned app for the past 4 years, crashes because of the FB app. WhatsApp, a Facebook owned app, will not give you read access to your own chat database - it’s encrypted. But they have an arrangement with Google where it’s will back up unencrypted to your Google account (though, Google won’t let you retrieve it ... only the WhatsApp app can) Everything about this duopoly, their cooperation and lack of co…

Also, you can't migrate WhatsApp between iPhone and Android. There's a utility called BackupTrans, which follows an extremely convoluted process including a step where they install an old version of WhatsApp. It seemed to work but it trips some wire and WhatsApp put me in an hour-long timeout state, twice. Since I very much depend on WhatsApp, I dare not use it anymore.

Which direction? I and my sis did both directions quite painlessly (includign images etc) a year back.
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