For a little more insight on what is happening behind the scenes, the Facebook SDK communicates back and forth with a data server. The client app code expects the data returned by the server to be in a particular format. But when the server suddenly starts sending data in a different format, the framework code is not prepared to handle the invalid response. So, the app code tries to access values that don’t exist — which leads to a fatal error and the app crashes.There are approaches that Facebook can use to guard against issues like this. For instance, when data is not how it should be, the SDK could be programmed to no-op without bringing the entire app down with it. It’s likely that engineering work to do this is already underway, it just takes time to track down every case where defensive checks need to be added, especially in a codebase as large and as sprawling as Facebook’s.
Gast
