
Facebook made its Android app crash to test user loyalty? - k-mcgrady
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-android-app-crash-tests
======
dkarapetyan
Sounds like the beginning of an urban legend. The truth of the matter is that
Facebook engineering is getting bloated just like all other big companies and
their apps crash not because they're testing user loyalty but because their
code is just shitty.

~~~
ch4s3
Their app has been crashing constantly since day 1. On high speed wifi, my
newsfeed regularly takes upwards of 10 seconds to load, and the iOS app
crashes like a drunk. They do some truly hard things, and coupled with their
"move fast and break things" ethos... well they end up with some stability
issues. I'm not sure its an issue of bloat though.

~~~
mschuster91
Funny enough: the FB app never crashed on me, but Twitter does reproducibly
crash after about 20 actions (Android).

Whatsapp however regularly loses its connection on Wifi (even when on battery,
and wifi powersaving is disabled), and after 6 hours I see "oh, 20 new
messages"...

Problem of scale is that neither of the three (or, actually two) companies has
a public bug tracker where one could report bugs and see if anything happened
with it. You basically feel like you're interacting with a fucking black box.

~~~
MicroBerto
Sounds like you guys and your apps are a mess. Is this really where we wanted
our mobile experience to go?

You know what rarely crashes for me? m.facebook.com on a web browser.

Facebook will never get installed on any device I own. Ever.

~~~
sbd01
I'm not a Facebook user myself, but I've heard that the Facebook website can
now send notifications through the browser, effectively eliminating the need
of a bloated, buggy app.

~~~
yzh
It's true and I find that feature very annoying. Of course I can turn it off,
but they shouldn't turn it on by default IMO.

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codesushi42
Why "make it"? It crashes perfectly fine on its own.

~~~
jbigelow76
Or...was it working as intended? _mind blown :)_

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incepted
Please either point directly to the article that claims to have uncovered this
(which is behind a paywall) or don't post anything.

Right now, there is zero evidence that any of this is real.

~~~
gruez
You can bypass the paywall by entering your email. Even in the full article
they only mention a confidential source, which makes sense because even if it
was real, it's very easy to cause a crash without leaving a trace in the app.
For instance, the server might purposefully send a malformed response that
causes the client to crash.

full article mirror:
[https://i.imgur.com/umOEvs7.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/umOEvs7.jpg)

~~~
sparky_
Did you use some tool or browser extension to generate this?

~~~
vmarsy
No the one you asked either, but I usually email me@onenote.com [1] from my
Gmail account with the URL in the subject, and it saves the page as content
AND as a long picture.

It would probably not work here since it would require to be logged in or
something, in that case I guess OneNote Clipper [2] would do the trick.

[1][https://www.onenote.com/EmailToOneNote](https://www.onenote.com/EmailToOneNote)

[2][http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/03/onenote-clipper-is-the-
bes...](http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/03/onenote-clipper-is-the-best-way-to-
save-web-pages-and-onenote-keeps-getting-better/)

~~~
greenleafjacob
Sounds like Stallman's web program. [1]

> I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see
> git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and
> then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless
> it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.

[1] [https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

------
electic
Doesn't anyone else think it is odd that all these stories have started to
appear in the last few day? It is almost like Google is planning something
known within Facebook and Facebook is trying to send Google a message that
they have a back up plan. Anytime I read articles with sources who are "off
the record" it makes me wonder.

------
greenimpala
And where is the reference / source of this claim?

~~~
notatoad
linked in the article: [https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-
contingency...](https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency-
planning)

~~~
iaw
The lede in that story doesn't even mention intentional crashes, anything not
behind a paywall?

~~~
notatoad
yes, here: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-
an...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-android-app-
crash-tests)

This is original reporting by The Information. They are the source of it, but
they're behind a paywall so we get links to blog posts about it. If you want
the source, you have to deal with a paywall.

------
fishanz
>defaulted to the mobile browser version of the social network, rather than
give up on Facebook entirely.

I'd rather use the mobile browser version of just about anyone's crappy app.
There might be a handful of exceptions.

~~~
joshmn
Tell that to clients. They're convinced that because they're in an app store
that they're instamillionaires. My favorite one is house hunting on an app, a
la Zillow.

The user numbers that a store reports are so pointless. It's a popularity
contest. I wish that someone (anyone) would pull out some open analytics to
show usage numbers instead.

At least it'd make my life easier.

------
orbitingpluto
I had a carrier locked phone that one day demanded that I log into Facebook.
It would repeatedly launch and I ended up having to flash the phone. Drove me
nuts.

------
jzelinskie
In my non-technical circle of friends most of us have recently given up and
uninstalled the Facebook app because of resource usage and undesired
notifications rather than crashes. I don't care if the app crashes every now
and then when I use it. I hate when it sends me notifications of people I've
met once and runs constantly in the background to do so.

------
jamiequint
Who gives a shit. They're free to degrade its performance all they like in
order to test it. Its not as if Facebook has some kind of SLA, its a free
service that nobody is obligated to use.

~~~
marshray
They have a lot of influence on standards of behavior for other web app
companies, not to mention expectations of users.

They are relevant, like an 800 pound gorilla.

------
pointnshoot
So they want us to believe that they are malicious, not incompetent?

Weird people...

------
pvelagal
Well, not sure if it is a coincidence. Facebook app on my iphone crashed
several times a couple of days ago.

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kra34
Yeah me too, whenever I have a bug it's just my way of testing user loyalty.

------
nijiko
"this person said"

Absolutely zero source or actual citation from an actual person.

------
Marcomasino
"Facebook, despite being the biggest app developer on Android, presents a
growing threat to Google."

Shouldn't that be Facebook is the biggest developer of Facebook apps on
Android?

Was this article written at Facebook HQ?

~~~
rajeevk
I think the author wanted to say biggest by number of downloads or by
popularity

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nitin_flanker
I deleted it.

------
aerialcombat
Very sneaky but clever.

------
teddyh
“ _I just don’t feel like our users_ love _us enough._ ”

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3970](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3970)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Everyone knows there's a relevant XKCD for everything, but when SMBC starts to
seriously predict the future, it means we live in _really weird_ times.

