Facebook Confirms Their iOS App Crashes Only Half As Much Now

Facebook engineers have been busy for the past few months trying to deal with an issue with the Apple core data system which was indirectly causing the iOS Facebook app to keep crashing over and over and over again.

With the move to mobile for a large proportion of the user base of Facebook, this presented somewhat of an urgent problem to fix, lest owners of iOS devices would keep suffering app shutdowns and eventually give up on Facebook altogether; to many the Facebook app IS Facebook and they've rarely, if ever, actually visited the Facebook web site in a web browser.

The mobile app is often a much faster way to take an action like adding a like, posting a quick comment or adding a new post. Until recently, users could also chat inside the app too though Facebook are turning people over to the Facebook Messenger app for this activity as much as they can.

Facebook for iOS Now Crashes 50% Less Often

The engineering team on August 12 happily announced that they had solved the particular problem that was causing the crash rate with the iOS app to be inordinately high. The Facebook app now crashes 50 percent less often on the iOS platform than it did before. It is unclear whether this will reduce the app crashing frequency down to an acceptable level for users or whether it's like if Boeing reported that fewer of their planes crashed into the Earth and caught fire last year... A 50% reduction in app crashes is not so great if the number of users experiencing Facebook app crashing is still high.

Tracking A Bug Is Different From Fixing It

Apparently the Facebook engineering team were finding their enormous user base and changing code base as difficult to deal with as replicating the problem and creating a fix for it. If the underlying app code keeps changing with new updates, then this almost puts any bug fix attempt back to square one because the engineering team have to then retest the bug to see if it is still present in the latest version of the app.

It's All About Mobile

The large user base also makes it difficult to roll out fixes because if they're wrongly applied, millions of users could get a negative outcome until the fix were rolled back. While testing can be rolled out to thousands, there are 1.32 billion active Facebook users and mobile grew by 31% from the same time last year so getting mobile right is vital to Facebook.