Facebook made its Android app crash to test user loyalty? | Hacker News Reader

Facebook made its Android app crash to test user loyalty?

theverge.com

66 pointsk-mcgrady44 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

Okay, it's fine. But face the fact that a lot of people use applications and there is a reason for it. It's not fluff. The situation on mobile browsers and their capabilities in comparison to native applications is quite straight forward. Web browsers can't compete. Yes it is getting better. But it's hardly a replacement. We're not there yet. Not even close.

A relevant article from a Mozilla developer, James Long: http://jlongster.com/Radical-Statements-about-the-Mobile-Web...

yep, I ditched Facebook app and I am using web version on the phone. Experience is bad, bordering just tolerable.

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.

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.

Me too, i use just the mobile version of facebook.com.

I know that exist Tinfoil if you concerned about privacy:

https://fossdroid.com/a/tinfoil-for-facebook.html

I use android and I've never encountered any issues of the sort you are describing.

edit: grammar

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

Or...was it working as intended? mind blown :)

even Belson couldn't come up with such excuse - like it was just a Nucleus' feature allowing to test viewers' loyalty to the show .

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.

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

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

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

[2]http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/03/onenote-clipper-is-the-bes...

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

In Firefox's developer toolbar (Tools -> Web Developer -> Developer Toolbar), you can type 'screenshot --fullpage' and it will save an image of the entire page for you.

I am not the person you asked, but I take screenshots for archival purposes not-infrequently (as seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845275).

The tool that I use is Phantomjs with a script called 'rasterize.js`. The big plus for me was the ability to render arbitrary dpi images of web pages.

> You can bypass the paywall by entering your email.

No. I tried before commenting: you need to enter a credit card too.

And the trick of looking up the article title on Google didn't work either.

Thanks for the mirror.

I didn't find any mention in the article of this "voluntary crash" claim, did I miss it?

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.

And where is the reference / source of this claim?

The lede in the source seems to focus on contingency plans for Android Apps around the Google Play Store. I suspect something is being misunderstood by the linked author.

EDIT: User gruez posted an image of the article here https://i.imgur.com/umOEvs7.jpg. There is one line from a single unattributed source describing a "one-time experiment several years ago"

linked in the article: https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency...

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

yes, here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-an...

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Weird people...

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

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

"this person said"

Absolutely zero source or actual citation from an actual person.

"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?

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

I deleted it.

Very sneaky but clever.

“I just don’t feel like our users love us enough.”

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3970

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.

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