Facebook SDK Issue Causing Some iOS Apps to Crash

[CordovaLark]

People still use facebook?

 

[Santiago]

Generally, by crashing. It's just a potential crash the developer explicitly ignored.

From the other posts, it looks like the root cause is Objective-C client code assuming decoded JSON has a specific type and then crashing because it's treating a boolean as a dictionary. In Swift, if you try using Codable to read JSON and it doesn't match what you expect, you get back a sensible error instead of crashing, and if you have objects of unknown type, you need to try explicitly casting them using as?, which makes it clear that you need to handle the failure state because it won't compile otherwise. In Objective-C, it's easy to write code that makes assumptions about object types which are wrong. (You can do that in Swift, too, but you have to explicitly do so, and if you're using ! or as! in production code, you're just asking for trouble.)

 

[fairuz]

Probably not, Facebook get away with a whole bunch of ****. No one seems to care. Sad, but true.

Zoom ripped out their Facebook SDK usage for privacy reasons, so there's that.
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Signing in with Facebook certainly reduced a lot of friction when it was the only game in town, but what a Faustian pact.

Yep, that and being able to look anyone up by name and message them. It was genuinely useful in college but not afterwards.
Also, I learned a new word today.

 

[FaustsHausUK]

Zoom ripped out their Facebook SDK usage for privacy reasons, so there's that.
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Yep, that and being able to look anyone up by name and message them. It was genuinely useful in college but not afterwards.
Also, I learned a new word today.

Can you tell it’s one of my favourite words? ☺️

 

[-narcan-]

Who in their right mind still has FB installed on their device?

Doesn't matter if the user has Facebook installed or not, the apps are still sending analytic data to Facebook.

 

[macintoshmac]

Doesn't matter if the user has Facebook installed or not, the apps are still sending analytic data to Facebook.

They are. It is a real nasty mess out there with everyone sending data to Facebook and making money by selling our usage and habits.

 

[J InTech82]

Zoom ripped out their Facebook SDK usage for privacy reasons, so there's that.
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Yep, that and being able to look anyone up by name and message them. It was genuinely useful in college but not afterwards.
Also, I learned a new word today.

Really? Because when I launch the app, I still see a sign in with Facebook option.

 

[fairuz]

Really? Because when I launch the app, I still see a sign in with Facebook option.

Apps can log in with Facebook without using the Facebook SDK, so it might be that.

 

[sdf]

you need to try explicitly casting them using as?, which makes it clear that you need to handle the failure state because it won't compile otherwise.

? is the behaviour of Objective-C, really. as? is a simple safe cast, which is a couple lines in Objective-C (but really should be part of the object library).

(In case anyone else is curious, I posted the code to do safe casts in Objective-C some time ago here: https://github.com/tewha/ObjectiveCDynamicCast/blob/master/ObjectiveCDynamicCast/Classes/NSObject+DynamicCast.m Usage would be NSString *alwaysString = [NSString dynamicCast:maybeString]. After, alwaysString is either actually a string or nil. You often want to do protocol compliance instead of an outright cast, though.)

On the other hand, ! doesn't really have an equivalent in Objective-C (unless you're doing field access with -> but that's totally nonstandard).

There's not much difference here if you know what you're doing in both languages, but I'll grant that there are a lot of people who don't.