Why the Facebook App Is Rated Below 2 Stars | Hacker News Reader

Why the Facebook App Is Rated Below 2 Stars

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As an iOS developer (and long time developer of apps dating back to early MacOS) I find it indefensible to have so many app crashes. This statements "As you may know, Facebook does not have big QA teams…we believe that developers are responsible for their own code, and they’re supposed to write the tests to do that." is total bullshit. I've seen this happen in multiple environments (big and small) over the years and it always results in crap results. QA/Test engineers are professionals at doing testing and should be testing continuously since day 1. It's nice the developers try to produce good code, but expecting them to be professional QA is ludicrous. My last large iOS app (previous employer) had a crash rate of 0.17% and we had awesome QA people who wouldn't let anything go out the door unless they were happy.

I agree with you on the need for good dedicated test engineers, but even an apparently low crash rate can be damaging at scale. If you have 10,000,000 customers, a crash rate of 0.17% (over some unspecified time period) is 17,000 crashes (in the same time period). On the other hand, if the crash is deterministic, but caused by some user-specific state that affects 0.17% of your customers, that's 17,000 unhappy customers who are drastically more likely to post reviews than the potentially millions of happy customers not experiencing crashes (and perhaps reviewed the app positively years ago).

Note: I don't use Facebook's app often, and have no context for what the actual issues are.

True on volume, we only had about 15K users per day. Half the bugs were iOS issues we could do nothing about, and the most of the rest were data related which were out of our control (but we fixed when they appeared). It's just the QA statement that bugs me, Apple may have quality issues but they have a gazillion products, and FB has very few.

It'd be a lot more manageable if Apple could simply provide memory guarantees to apps. It's not an unreasonable request. Having to close other apps or reboot the device to get an app to launch is frustrating for developers and users alike.

It's hard to do on mobile devices, there is no paging like a desktop system would have. I rarely have this issue though, maybe there are some apps that have more issues than others, or maybe it happens more on older devices. I do think iPhones need 2GB now instead of just 1.

I was going to include a snarky comment about wanting iOS to graduate to a big boy memory system like a big boy OS but decided to be more polite. :)

Rule of thumb is an app can allocate approximate 50% of total device memory before crashing. But there's no hard limit and it depends on your allocation pattern. If you request too much too fast it'll crash as well. Sometimes you have to let it fail and spin for 3 seconds trying to allocate again hoping it'll go through. Sometimes it will and sometimes it won't!

Or provide more than 1 GB of RAM for what is, effectively, a full blown computing device.

I think mobile is just too new to be good. It a wild west ghetto of terrible, terrible apps. I tried using Android and iOS as a desktop replacement only to be shocked by the poor quality of the best apps and being hamstrung by lack of features.

Mobile decision making is made mostly by consumers, not business. These devices are for people to play angry birds and check email. Android and iOS aren't under a lot of pressure to provide a stable and well audited environment. Sales are good, apps are selling, etc why rock the boat?

I think as these platforms mature things might change, but from what I can tell, there's still a major disincentive to move off the Windows ecosystem, especially when I can have a quasi-mobile experience with the Surface line. Its too much amateur hour in mobile. The post-PC cheerleading, it seems, was way premature.

This is a general comment. I am not defending Facebook at all.

One of the problems with feedback systems is that they truly fail to present a balanced view of the user or customer base. The people with the motivation and drive to post reviews and feedback in ecosystems such as the App Store and Amazon are those with problems. And so the rating that is produced isn't a true reflection of how well an app is received or how good a product might be.

We happen to have both a physical product business operating on Amazon and an app business on the Apple App Store. Based on this experience I'll say most apps and products receive feedback from 1 out of 500 to 1,000 people who purchase the product. Put another way, the rating figure is based on the opinions of approximately 0.1% of users, if that. And it is also far more likely that the review-posting population is highly biased in favor of people experiencing difficulties.

In other words, based on my experience, I think these rating systems that consist of a linear vote count equation are deeply flawed as they fail to capture reality in any measurable way.

Facebook seems to be fishing for a broader selection of reviewers with nag screens asking for a review.

That tactic wouldn't seem likely to generate favorable reviews.

Review systems need "page rank" or at least some way to filter based on whether you, personally, found a review helpful.

I don't care if a 10 year old rated an app 1 star because they didn't like the colors, or a new computer user was confused by an interface. I want to know if people like me -- with my experience level -- found the app difficult.

Movie reviews follow the same thing, it's hard to look at overall ratings. I want to know the opinions of people like me.

App updates also throw off reviews quite a bit, an update that changes a behavior (or color like you said) is likely to receive a large amount of negative reviews, just because users were used to the old way. These reviews are potentially valuable information for other users of the previous version. However it's mostly irrelevant to new users.

But, that holds true for all apps. So why is facebook rated comparatively worse?

People don't divide their time equally between apps. I have apps I haven't touched in a year. I would venture to guess the FB app is only behind phone and SMS in terms of usage. This means that, yes, review are far more likely to be left for the FB app and, within that user base, those with issues have far more motivation to leave reviews than those who are happy.

Again, not saying the FB app is good. I barely use it. Don't know. What I am saying is that review systems in general are very broken.

On the other hand there are various paid schemes that give glowing 5 star reviews without providing any kind of meaningful real world feedback about the product.

Well, if you read the beginning of the post, that's mentioned too. The theory that alot of people are suffering in silence so to speak. A ninety percent negative rating though...that almost puts a guarantee that there is a fire, not just smoke.

For me the one reason I had to uninstall the app and rate it 1 star were the notifications. Most of the notifications that are actually useful you can toggle on/off (like receiving a message). However, this particular useless one is not toggleable and occurred at least once a day.

Asking me if I know somebody is not a "notification". My phone should not vibrate or make a noise because Facebook wants to friend more people. There are other annoying notifications, but this is the main one that pisses me off.

Compare this to 'Paper', Facebook's other iOS app which has 4 stars:

https://www.facebook.com/paper

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-stories-from-facebook/...

Not only is it a great app, but it's also given back to the iOS community in the form of several great open source projects:

https://facebook.github.io/origami/ https://github.com/facebook/pop http://asyncdisplaykit.org

I find it fascinating that Facebook has two independent iOS efforts, and that while one is clearly better than the other, they seem content to pursue both apps. (Notably, Paper is still not available outside the US–I use Papers personally and can't imagine going back to the default app which just feels a bit lifeless in comparison, crashes/bugginess aside.)

Doesn't the 4 stars also speak to the focus Paper has versus the 'catchall' UX of Facebook's primary app?

I can't stand Paper, and would have rated it poorly, but instead I just deleted it and use the normal app.

Paper is interesting, ambitious, and certainly seems crafted with more love than the normal Facebook app, but I'm not sure you can say it's better. I tried it out for a while but ultimately found it was getting in the way of my basic FB needs. I'm a pretty geeky user; when I've tried to get more mainstream people to use Paper, they just get realllly confused and go running back to normal FB.

These days, I just use the FB web page, and messenger. (I love that they split messenger into its own app. I wish they'd do something similar for desktop.)

All these people hate Facebook, but they still use Facebook. How many of those one-star reviews were written by people who still launch the app 20 times a day? What incentive does Facebook really have to change their QA practices?

I guess the more someone uses an app the more credible the review will be.

I'm not sure companies view it that way, and especially not companies like Facebook, whose product is the people who use their apps. As long as the person demonstrates he will use the product in spite of his problems with it, his opinions actually mean very little.

Think of it like a politician might: once you've donated to his campaign he has no incentive to give a fig what you think.

Of course people with lots of clout and wealth are special cases and the above don't necessarily apply to them.

Facebook Messenger has been a top 5 app in the App Store since it was released, so there hasn't been any repercussions from the one-star reviews (mostly because people don't have a choice not to use it if they use Facebook).

Realistically, the main reason people use facebook is network effects. They will put up with some amount of bullshit.

But the flipside of that is that if it becomes too bad, then the first people who start leaving weakens the network effects and cause more people to leave, leading to a chain reaction and a swift collapse.

Facebook's incentive is to prevent such a collapse.

Facebook released Messenger for this reason. Facebook saw that people were starting to use Facebook less and stand-alone apps more (Instagram, WhatsApp, SnapChat, etc.). This is also the reason why Facebook now owns two out of those three.

Perhaps also because FB on mobile is more advert intrusive with sometimes 75% of screen space taken over by ads that are disguised as user content.

It runs me off the mobile app, I use the web interface.

Also the huge list of Permissions it requires.

Personally, I visit the newsfeed less and less these days. Paper and Pages are my only FB contact these days. The Pages app gets multiple visits in a day, but Paper gets about one visit a week from me. This whole QA stand by FB, if true, is just wrong and signals that FB doesn't understand user experience yet.

You are right, this is not a QA problem, but much more complex.

I'd say it's a mix of people who don't equate the Facebook app with the Facebook content, who don't like Facebook as a company, but loves the content and who don't feel that their recommendation is necessary for spreading the app (that is, one can give it 1 star to punish FB for my app crashing, but I still recommend friends to download it)

My 1st guess was forcing everyone to download and use Messenger

I believe "tricking" is the correct term to use.

Messenger is great. You can forget about the whole Facebook feed experience while still being able to talk to your friends and family!

Here's a chart of Facebook's overall app score according to Applause Analytics over time (since 2011). It is an abstraction on the generic star rating.

http://i.imgur.com/iB2SMwC.png

What it shows is that there has been a general trend down in their app score - there seems to be a further dip around the time of Messenger but the reviews seem to indicate a lot of frustration around stability.

For apps that have been popular for a long time, I wonder if there is a negative bias in reviews (beyond that already present in all online reviews). A customer who gets an update that breaks an app they use every day is very likely to submit a negative review (even if they have reviewed positively in the past). However, a customer that gets and update that make incremental changes that largely don't affect them has no incentive to go post a positive review of the new version. So, the positive reviews come only from new customers, which are relatively small for apps that have reached saturation.

One interesting sub-trend in the data would support that view - it is that the review star rating, meaning reviews+star rating is, on average, more negative than just star rating. So people post a negative review when they feel pain, but not in the case where they are just rating the app.

I still don't understand why people hate Messenger so much. It works fine for me, indistinguishable from when it was included in the main Facebook app.

Messenger is much more intrusive to the whole phone experience than the Facebook messaging functionality that was included in the app. Though, to be honest, even that went downhill in the same direction as Messenger -- though not as far -- before it was removed and messenger made mandatory.

Many don't trust FB anymore or the invasive data tracking of Messenger. I've overheard comments from friends and family that they won't be forced to download another app, especially one that keeps such close watch on users.

The biggest takeaway from this story is "The absence of a specific QA function may be hampering the company as well." QA is vital. A proper QA department sees the forest and the trees. Developers see the trees (or, in some cases, just the branches). Having proper QA means that John doesn't accidentally break something that Julie was working on, because they run regression tests. It's quite astonishing that QA isn't a separate team at Facebook for their iOS apps.

I noticed a lot of low ratings once Facebook hid the "Most Recent" version of the feed to force you to take 3 steps.

Previously they had an easy way of switching between the two all within the first view that showed by default, now it's just a pain in the ass and it seems like none of the devs actually use it.

Facebook is clearly a big believer in test automation - to the extent that they do not appear to believe (by their approach and hiring) in manual testing - big mistake imho. Best approach from my point of view is a portfolio approach that includes automation and manual testing.

Facebook has a reputation as a battery hog on iOS.

http://www.scottyloveless.com/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-t...

I just use the website now. Somehow it manages to offer chat as well as news feed without displacing me to another domain, or whatever is analogous to opening up an entirely separate app.

I just don't buy that spinning off messenger was good for customers, especially considering they have really failed to create a good experience all around.

Same here. I'm using the mobile web versions of Facebook, Twitter and G+ on my iPad and iPhone and I'm not (yet) missing any of the features of the native apps.

I think this might be the start of the shift from apps back to the web. Why clutter your phone with notifications, saved data and background processes when the website offers more features with less overhead?

I agree completely, the crashes are the #1 problem. In fact its almost unbelievable that such a buggy app could be passed through the app store process (I'm sure Facebook gets very special treatment with app store reviews, though).

One big issue I've noticed is that the app is borderline unusable on older devices (iphone 4). This may explain the huge number of people who are reporting these issues, which certainly happen less on newer devices. I've noticed what looks like a small UI hickup on my 5s will crash the iphone 4.

Yeah, that could be it, since I don't think I've ever had a Facebook crash on my iPhone 6.

Interesting facebook doesnt have 2 separate apps. A "stable" version and a "beta" version that people can use. When a beta version runs well enough make that one the stable version. People running a "beta" that has some bugs will be far more forgiving than people running "stable" versions with bugs.

I use facebook's Paper app, which is essentially this. I have found it to be totally stable, a much more pleasing interface, and (for those who care, I personally don't) you don't need the Messenger app either. I don't use the content aggregation either--it's just a significantly nicer facebook interface.

It's rate 4+ on the app store, with 512 reviews. I think it's just less well-known.

Edit: link https://www.facebook.com/paper

I believe Paper is only available on the US App Store as well as being iOS only. So it isn't surprising it's not well known.

I didn't realize it was US only. I wonder why.

You might think this until you read the 1-star reviews written by people running developer/preview builds of iOS. Think "App crashes on iOS 9 alpha 6, this is a HUGE inconvenience!"

Not providing update notes is the real mind-boggler for me. It is just a giant FU to the users.

(Messenger does provide release notes; it's just the FB app proper that doesn't.)

It's because app updates include features, but the roll-out of those features is staged internally at Facebook. So there are no features in any given update that can be announced.

Hmm, I find that explanation pretty uncompelling as a user.

They could either hold the app release until the features go live, or list the coming features, but note that rollout would not be immediate (lots of precedent there w/ e.g. graph search).

To be frank, if someone is rating the entire Facebook app as 1-star because they are forced to use the Messenger app, that's a bullshit review that I put no stock in.

Btw. I wanted to boost my blog post on facebook. Facebook didn't approve it. Reason: "Your ad wasn't approved because it includes an improper reference to Facebook". Wasn't facebook all about free speech? https://twitter.com/mposchenrieder/status/557225783286980608

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