Apps That Crash – Facebook
Just like everyone out there I was thrilled to get the new copy of Facebook for my iPhone. It’s new design is a fantastic improvement over the previous version and I spent countless hours exploring the new features. But it keeps crashing on me.
Yup. That’s right. Facebook with all of it’s ingenuity and manpower still creates an app that crashes. But it may also be the iPhone itself that is the problem as well.
When developing for the iPhone platform, Apple leaves the memory management to the app. If the app is not carefully designed to manage memory and data it can crash. I’m not asserting this is the reason Facebook crashes but we have seen this be an issue. Additionally, if the app does not properly accomodate the data network it is on (2G, 3G, Wifi) the app may also crash.
In the early days of the app store, Apple took the approval of apps seriously. Apps would be rejected during the evaluation process for minor infractions to the development guidelines. As the volume of submissions increased Apple seemed to be more lax with their rules. Brand name apps (WSJ comes to mind) with perpetual problems seemed to keep getting approved.
This is a good lesson. You can’t skirt the fact that with higher volume, you innevitably risk quality… No matter who you are.
