Facebook deletes iPhone apps from its system | Hacker News Reader

Facebook deletes iPhone apps from its system

news.cnet.com

52 pointsmcantelon23 comments

I think I know what happened - this is the fallout from iPad facebook story.

On day one of iPad there was some app called "Facebook" for $3 which wasn't really the app from Facebook itself, but some dude making a quick buck. Apparently some big wig then issued instructions "clear up our name usage on iPad/iPhone" and someone else implemented it via

SEND_TAKEDOWN_NOTICE(query("SELECT * FROM apps WHERE name LIKE '%facebook%'")).

That sounds plausible but it still sucks. Affected developers should email me with details: so@facebook.tld.

I can't promise that I'll be able to do anything but I'll try to be your advocate within the company.

I thought the iPhone app approval process was supposed to prevent that kind of thing?

Apple will do the basic, honest attempt to prevent trampling on others trademarks but it's not an outright bannination.

In general with social networking its a gray area - if an app is a twitter client does it have a reason to have "twitter" in the name? It surely does. If I was Apple I would promptly react to mark holder complains rather than proactively deny things.

I would also make exception for major marks - I would contact them proactively and ask for guidance. And then if I was Facebook from before the iPad incident I would say "it's cool, let it slide - we'll deal with it later if there is ever a real problem".

Facebook is relentlessly and constantly capricious with its API users. This kind of thing is an every day occurrence with them; if they're not doing it on purpose, they're doing it by accident because they don't appear to test their own APIs.

Deja vu. Back before Zuck gave his awkward f8 platform speech I built an app called FaceFreaks... even though their DEMO application was called "MochaBook" they later shut down all the apps that had "Face" or "Book" in the name. The moment I got that email I decided I would never depend on another platform again. Since then it's become clear to everyone that you're borderline mad if you do.

"Open data" is a joke. the same human beings who ran AOL in 94 are running Facebook today. Their openness was only a competitive advantage they used to build their business (much more open than match.com or AOL profiles). Just because we all read reddit and hackernews we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking people are somehow nicer or more open now out of goodwill. They are only open to the degree it supports their business model, period.

One day someone will out-open facebook. Imagine facebook without any privacy controls and no way to manage your personal online "brand" -- it's coming, but it won't be out of altruism.

I never understand it when companies take this sort of unexpected and unilateral action. As long as no one is acting in bad faith, how hard is it to contact developers first and let them know what changes need to be made rather than simply deleting their accounts?

A lot harder than just pulling the plug and forcing the devs to do the work of investigation/guessing and reinstatement.

With Apple, at least you can blame it on Steve Jobs' overinflated ego. With Facebook, it is most likely some middle-tier lawyer "just doing his job." That seems to have been the case with IBM and TurboHercules.

That said, as we move to more "cloud-oriented" platforms, we are most likely going to see more and more of these types of issues. And suddenly, regardless of how open the platform that you are running on locally is, all of your data and applications are living in a world that is locked-down and has arbitrarily-enforced rules and regulations. My only hope is that open platforms "win" in the end..

Actually it sounds worse than that:

  NodConcept's Chris Diskin, makers of the Emoti for
  Facebook app, said he was contacted via e-mail on
  Monday by Apple saying that Facebook believed his
  app was infringing on their rights. They provided
  him with contact info at Facebook and said he had
  five days to resolve the issue.

  Diskin told CNET that he immediately called Facebook
  and was told they would get back to him to explain
  the issue. They never contacted him, instead choosing
  to delete his developer credentials from the system.

They bothered to give him time to fix a problem that they didn't bother to specify. When he asked them for specifics, they blew him off.

They are acting in bad faith to people, but in good faith to getting profit margins.

My take is that Facebook is preparing a new release of an iPhone app and a marketing campaign to boot.

When you are a big company it takes a conscious effort not to be a dick by trampling the little guy. And this culture has to be set from the top. Given Facebook's history, being nice to the little guy has never been a high priority, so I'm not surprised with this incident either.

Doesn't Facebook benefit dramatically from all these apps? Hundreds of free developers filling use-case niches and giving end-users more reasons to connect with the Facebook platform. All blown to smithereens over a too-hasty decision to fire first and ask for fixes later.

Really sad.

After a careful reading of the article, Facebook shot down developers/apps with Facebook in the name or using the Facebook icon.

I would assume this is in response to the horrifically bad "Facebook Ultimate" app that was top in social paid apps on iPad launch day:

[1] http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/04/fake-ipad-facebook/

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7560417/Unoff...

I'd read the reviews to see how the 7th highest app had a single star -- all were excoriating. But people saw the icon and name and clicked Buy in droves.

Facebook did the right thing by putting a kibosh on it and any others that might come up with a search for Facebook or spotted with a Facebook "f" icon.

> Facebook did the right thing by putting a kibosh on it and any others that might come up with a search for Facebook or spotted with a Facebook "f" icon.

Lots of people will come out and say that including the name and the icon is a minor thing, but this is exactly why it's more than that. It's similar to how searching google for "Facebook login" brings up a blog post with a few hundred comments about trying to log into facebook.

Edit: doing that search now has several sites right up top now for "Facebook Login Help" and such. I don't remember those being there before.

They try to make themselves out as the good guys that are fighting for the rights and privacy of their users:

  "We ensure that applications that access Facebook user
  data adhere to Facebook Platform policies," Facebook's
  representative Malorie Lucich said in an e-mail to
  CNET.

But really they are only being petty over small issues:

  Diskin finally got a call late Tuesday saying he is
  infringing on Facebook's rights because he uses the
  word "Facebook" in his app name to let people know
  what it does.

Not an iPhone developer, so let me know if this does not make any sense.

Is the Facebook public key hardcoded on the app? Since presumably the app needs Facebook to run, they need to be connected to the internet, so maybe there could've been some phone home page where the app gets the key (caches it for some amount of time) and uses that -- it won't fix the issue of Facebook revoking keys, but at least if it gets fixed (with Facebook) you don't have to resubmit an app and wait for Apple.

I doubt either facebook or developers would be willing to expose their developer credentials / keys on a (mostly) publicly readable page. Embedding it into the app itself seems like the most reasonable solution.

I replied to the other thread, but basically, you're not supposed to put your private key on your iPhone app anyhow, as it can be taken. As for the public key, it is obviously public anyhow.

The public and private keys are stored in the app. Pulling them down the pipe is a bad idea, IMO.

For Facebook things, you can go through a session proxy instead of using the private key. I'll imagine storing a private key on the app (on the iPhone) is not desirable anyhow. The public key is, obviously, public.

Facebook can just email Apple to request them to remove the apps from App store. And Apple do entertain such requests. I got one from Twitter. But from my limited experience, the people in charge of this seems reasonable.

Companies that have an application ecosystem that depends on external developers need to explicitly state how applications can say "This is an X app" and what, if any, icons they can use.

I would think it's in Facebook's interest to give out a set of app icons, or to have an app naming policy.

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