I don’t know why you would use the official Facebook app on the iPhone — Paper’s fabulous — but just in case you do, you’ll be happy to know that Facebook has squashed a pretty major bug that reduces crash rates by 50 per cent.
The company’s engineering blog states that one of the app’s top crashes was in the Apple Core Data system. It took months for Facebook’s engineering team to create the correct approach to the problem after receiving the crashes into a report analyzer.
Facebook engineers Slobodan Predolac and Nicolas Spiegelberg write:
Several months ago, one of our top crashes on iOS was manifesting itself in Apple’s Core Data system, an object-relational mapper into the underlying database (SQLite). We were receiving these crashes into our crash report analyzer, but it took months to figure out the right angle to approach the problem from. Using Hipal and Scuba to query and aggregate across reports, we found out that the Code Data error code numbers varied across half a dozen different manifestations.
The blog post goes on to give a lengthy and detailed description of the steps the Facebook engineering team took to resolve the issue, so be sure to head over if this is the kind of stuff that rocks your boat.
For the rest of us, the Facebook app on iOS should now crash a lot less. [The Facebook Engineering Blog]