26 ms·

Facebook made its Android app crash to test user loyalty?

66 points by k-mcgrady 11y ago

aerialcombat 11y ago
Very sneaky but clever.
incepted 11y ago
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.
- gruez 11y ago
  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 https://i.imgur.com/umOEvs7.jpg
  - sparky_ 11y ago
    Did you use some tool or browser extension to generate this?
    - lelandbatey 11y ago
      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 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.
    - vmarsy 11y ago
      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 https://www.onenote.com/EmailToOneNote [2]http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/03/onenote-clipper-is-the-best-way-to-save-web-pages-and-onenote-keeps-getting-better/ http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/03/onenote-clipper-is-the-bes...
      - greenleafjacob 11y ago
        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 https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
    - melloc 11y ago
      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.
  - incepted 11y ago
    > 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.
  - incepted 11y ago
    Thanks for the mirror. I didn't find any mention in the article of this "voluntary crash" claim, did I miss it?
teddyh 11y ago
“I just don’t feel like our users love us enough.” http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3970 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3970
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  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.
greenimpala 11y ago
And where is the reference / source of this claim?
- notatoad 11y ago
  linked in the article: https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency-planning https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency...
  - iaw 11y ago
    The lede in that story doesn't even mention intentional crashes, anything not behind a paywall?
    - notatoad 11y ago
      yes, here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-android-app-crash-tests 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.
- iaw 11y ago
  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 https://i.imgur.com/umOEvs7.jpg. There is one line from a single unattributed source describing a "one-time experiment several years ago"
pvelagal 11y ago
Well, not sure if it is a coincidence. Facebook app on my iphone crashed several times a couple of days ago.
dkarapetyan 11y ago
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.
- ch4s3 11y ago
  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.
  - foota 11y ago
    I use android and I've never encountered any issues of the sort you are describing. edit: grammar
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    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.
    - MicroBerto 11y ago
      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.
      - 11y ago
electic 11y ago
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.
nijiko 11y ago
"this person said" Absolutely zero source or actual citation from an actual person.
codesushi42 11y ago
Why "make it"? It crashes perfectly fine on its own.
- jbigelow76 11y ago
  Or...was it working as intended? mind blown :)
- trhway 11y ago
  even Belson couldn't come up with such excuse - like it was just a Nucleus' feature allowing to test viewers' loyalty to the show .
jamiequint 11y ago
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.
- marshray 11y ago
  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.
fishanz 11y ago
>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.
- joshmn 11y ago
  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.
orbitingpluto 11y ago
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.
nitin_flanker 11y ago
I deleted it.
Marcomasino 11y ago
"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?
- rajeevk 11y ago
  I think the author wanted to say biggest by number of downloads or by popularity
pointnshoot 11y ago
So they want us to believe that they are malicious, not incompetent? Weird people...
kra34 11y ago
Yeah me too, whenever I have a bug it's just my way of testing user loyalty.
jzelinskie 11y ago
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.

66 points by k-mcgrady 11y ago

Very sneaky but clever.

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.

gruez 11y ago
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 https://i.imgur.com/umOEvs7.jpg
- sparky_ 11y ago
  Did you use some tool or browser extension to generate this?
  - lelandbatey 11y ago
    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 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.
  - vmarsy 11y ago
    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 https://www.onenote.com/EmailToOneNote [2]http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/03/onenote-clipper-is-the-best-way-to-save-web-pages-and-onenote-keeps-getting-better/ http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/03/onenote-clipper-is-the-bes...
    - greenleafjacob 11y ago
      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 https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
  - melloc 11y ago
    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.
- incepted 11y ago
  > 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.
- incepted 11y ago
  Thanks for the mirror. I didn't find any mention in the article of this "voluntary crash" claim, did I miss it?

teddyh 11y ago

“I just don’t feel like our users love us enough.” http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3970 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3970

TeMPOraL 11y ago
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.

greenimpala 11y ago

And where is the reference / source of this claim?

notatoad 11y ago
linked in the article: https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency-planning https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency...
- iaw 11y ago
  The lede in that story doesn't even mention intentional crashes, anything not behind a paywall?
  - notatoad 11y ago
    yes, here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-android-app-crash-tests 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.
iaw 11y ago
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 https://i.imgur.com/umOEvs7.jpg. There is one line from a single unattributed source describing a "one-time experiment several years ago"

pvelagal 11y ago

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

dkarapetyan 11y ago

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.

ch4s3 11y ago
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.
- foota 11y ago
  I use android and I've never encountered any issues of the sort you are describing. edit: grammar
- mschuster91 11y ago
  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.
  - MicroBerto 11y ago
    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.
    - 11y ago

electic 11y ago

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.

nijiko 11y ago

"this person said" Absolutely zero source or actual citation from an actual person.

codesushi42 11y ago

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

jbigelow76 11y ago
Or...was it working as intended? mind blown :)
trhway 11y ago
even Belson couldn't come up with such excuse - like it was just a Nucleus' feature allowing to test viewers' loyalty to the show .

jamiequint 11y ago

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.

marshray 11y ago
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.

fishanz 11y ago

>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.

joshmn 11y ago
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.

orbitingpluto 11y ago

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.

nitin_flanker 11y ago

I deleted it.

Marcomasino 11y ago

"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?

rajeevk 11y ago
I think the author wanted to say biggest by number of downloads or by popularity

pointnshoot 11y ago

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

kra34 11y ago

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

jzelinskie 11y ago

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.