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Firebase SDK is crashing all iOS apps since this morning

135 points · 72 comments · pranshuchittora

  1. Skwid · · focus · HN ↗
    I'm hearing an awful lot of "How could they do this to us?" and not a lot of "Wow, maybe we should have read some of this 3rd party code we bundled into 'ALLLL' of our apps"

    Just an ignorant and naive outsider's take, but to me it paints a pretty damning picture of the state of mobile development.

    1. bcye · · focus · HN ↗
      You're already trusting them with their proprietary cloud products, whose code you can't read. Why wouldn't you trust them with their client SDK code.
      1. jeroenhd · · focus · HN ↗
        Because their client SDK might crash the entire app if the server does something funky. We saw it before with Facebook, and now it's Firebase's turn.

        A dependency on code you can't read reaching out to servers you don't control is a recipe for disaster. If you can control the server, you can try to add fixes, redirect DNS to a backup cluster, you name it. If you implement the client, you can write the code in a way that doesn't cause full crashes when the remote server does something weird. If you can do neither, you're handing over your business flow and uptime to a third party that doesn't care about you in the slightest.

        1. bcye · · focus · HN ↗
          Well your database crashing isn't much better for your uptime really
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