One fine morning, I opened my favorite music streaming app, Spotify, on an iOS device and it crashed.
It could have been because I was using iOS 14 beta. Without pondering it too much, I went ahead and opened my favorite blogging app, Medium. And it crashed as well.
Two of my favorite apps being down at the same time was a weird coincidence. I reinstalled the apps, rebooted my device, but still no luck. The issue persisted.
Strangely, WhatsApp and Instagram were working just fine.
I quickly jumped onto the Twitter web browser to check if there was anything. After all, any breaking news and outages are first reported on the microblogging social media platform.
And it turns out the issue was neither with Apple’s ecosystem nor a lapse in those apps. It was actually a glitch on Facebook’s end.
Facebook’s iOS SDK is widely used across apps on the App Store and had a glaring bug on its server side. It brought down every popular app ranging from Pinterest, Tinder, and TikTok to Medium, Spotify, and PUBG.
This was a strange 20-minute period that caused more than 500K crashes in the Apple ecosystem — one of the biggest in recent times.
Facebook’s SDK Is a Kill Switch Button Present in Almost Every App
Facebook might not have its own mobile operating system, but it’s smartly poised in almost every app on your phone.
Specifically, their open-source SDK is used for easy integration of the Login with Facebook button, analyzing rich metrics, and other utilities such as ad-tracking.
This means if your application accepts permission for location or Bluetooth, Facebook’s SDK can access that data.
Knowing Facebook’s history with data tracking and privacy breaches, not only is their SDK a spy camera, but it’s also highly unreliable. Realistically, Facebook’s SDK is a remote button that can bring apps down in a second.
#apple #ios #facebook #programming #privacy #sdk