Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

edit: grammar

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.

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com