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Facebook may have deliberately crashed its own mobile app

JT | January 11, 2016

Reports have been made that the social network deliberately sabotaged its own application to test user loyalty.

Facebook has now been accused of deliberately crashing its own mobile app as a part of a test of its user patience and loyalty so they can better understand how dedicated people are to the social network.

This isn’t the first time the social media platform has been involved in psychological testing of its users.

The accusation came in the form of a report published in The Information entitled “Facebook’s Android Contingency Planning.” The report stated that the social network was “testing how addicted Android phone users are to Facebook apps and making sure they can quickly download them directly from Facebook rather than through Google Play.” The publication said their source was an individual who was familiar with that specific experiment.

The suggestion in the report was that plans were being made in case the mobile app was taken down from Google Play.

Within the report, it said that “artificial errors” were deliberately introduced into the smartphone application which would cause it to crash “for hours at a time.” It claimed that the reason the test was being conducted was in order to “prepar[e] for the eventuality that it leaves the Google Play app store.”

As a part of this, the social network deliberately crashed their mobile application for some of its users, off-and-on, over a span of a number of weeks. The goal was to measure whether or not those individuals would prefer to visit the mobile website or whether they would simply give up on using Facebook. What they found was that users were, indeed, willing to use the mobile site instead of abandoning their use of that social network.

Allegedly, this entire psychological experiment on Facebook users was to find out whether or not users were addicted enough to the social network that they would continue to use the platform even if the mobile app were to face difficulties or even be removed from the Google Play Store. At the time of the writing of this article, Facebook had not yet made any official statements with regards to this accusation.

Facebook will be using different mobile apps for many of its features

Julie Campbell | January 5, 2015

The social network will be facing a number of changes in its user experience over smartphones and tablets.

Facebook has decided that one or two mobile apps isn’t taking up enough real estate on smartphones and tablets and has now announced that in 2015, it will be dividing many of its features into a number of different separate applications, instead of a more all-in-one opportunity that it previously provided.

The social network has stated that it is going forward with this decision and it will be starting quite soon.

In 2015, it plans to start to move a growing number of its features away from its main application and into separate mobile apps of their own. According to the Facebook Canada managing director, Jordan Banks, who is also the global head of vertical strategy for the company, “We’re getting away from that single app that does everything for you. We released nine different apps in 2014 and I think what you’ll see is we’ll release more in 2015 — at the demand and behest of our users.”

Facebook feels that its users wants separate mobile apps that will each do one thing very effectively.

Banks explained that they feel that most of the users of mobile social media would like features in individual apps “that do one thing incredibly well.” Therefore, they have taken Messenger out of the main Facebook app, for example, and have placed it into its own standalone app. They claim that the reason they have done it is that “that’s what our users were telling us. They didn’t want to click two or three times before they got into Messenger.”

For this reason, Banks expressed that it is likely that this will be a considerable trend for the company as it moves forward. Facebook will start to be focused on issuing more individual apps with the new features from the company, instead of continuing to build on one central application.

Although at the time of the writing of this article, Banks stated that he had heard only positive feedback about the decision, users have been complaining quite loudly about the separate mobile apps for different features, particularly in terms of the Facebook Messenger option. At the Apple App Store, there are currently a larger number of one-star reviews for the decision than there is applause.