Monday, July 13, 2020

Another Facebook SDK Crash

John Sundell (also: Hacker News):

Facebook’s SDK is once again causing numerous iOS apps to crash on launch.

Here are some of the GitHub issues. It seems like another case of a server change causing an unexpected JSON value to be returned.

Jumhyn:

The current Facebook Developer Policy requires that developers use the official Facebook SDK when implementing Facebook Login in their native app. Given that Facebook cannot ensure the stability of their SDK (resulting in the crashing of client apps), developers should have a policy-compliant option for implementing the login API themselves to avoid Facebook’s QA practices rendering their apps unusable.

See also: SDKs should not crash apps — learnings from the Facebook outage.

Previously:

Update (2020-07-30): Nick Heer:

Must be nice for Facebook to have the apparent blame fall on other developers and Apple because no user is going to think “Spotify crashed on my iPhone because of Facebook”. Also, notice that this doesn’t happen to Facebook’s own apps.

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"Given that Facebook cannot ensure the stability of their SDK (resulting in the crashing of client apps), developers should have a policy-compliant option for implementing the login API themselves to avoid Facebook’s QA practices rendering their apps unusable."

Or how about just don't use it?

I remember when they added the Facebook Login option. My first thought was "Why would anyone ever use this?" because it seems so stupid to tie your Spotify account (for ex) to your Facebook account, and that was long before Facebook had the widespread reputation of being fairly loose with everyone's private data, using their APIs to track you all across the internet, and all of the other evil things they've been caught doing in the last 5 years.

What happens when you get locked out of your Facebook account, then you can't login to anything else? Or what happens when you delete your Facebook account, then you have to recreate all the other accounts using your email address which you should have originally done to begin with? And in the process, you probably lose all of your accumulated data (such as Spotify playlists and personalized listening history) because there's no way to migrate from a Facebook Login account to a Email Login account?

So now I wonder why in 2020 would anyone even think about tying their Facebook account to anything else?

Or how about just don’t use it?

I remember when they added the Facebook Login option. My first thought was “Why would anyone ever use this?” because it seems so stupid to tie your Spotify account (for ex) to your Facebook account

Well, for Spotify, maybe.

When Spotify was still fledgling, though? Or for Your Friendly Neighbor’s Coffee Delivery Service?

These OAuth services are tradeoff between:

do you trust the service provider to have even more data on what you do? and
do you trust any random website to do a good job with your information?

That makes Sign in with Apple compelling. Data analysis isn’t a significant source of revenue for Apple, so it’s reasonable to assume they’re more trustworthy than Facebook and Google.

@Ben But now it’s too late because they can’t drop support for people who were logging in via Facebook.

@Michael
True, but could services not offer a migration to a stand alone sign-in account? Technically, this should be possible, yes? Did Google not make everyone with a YouTube account become a Google user? Yahoo and Flickr? Seems feasible technically. More of a PR problem really.

@Nathan Possible, but don’t you still have to keep it around forever for the users who don’t migrate and you don’t have contact info for?

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