To test the limits of consumer patience, the company crashed the app again and again and again to see who stuck around.
Facebook is no stranger to "Is this in my terms of service?" experiments, like when they performed a psychology experiment on unsuspecting users. But a report from The Information
indicates they didn't quite learn their lesson. In order to test the
limits of how much their user base would put up with constant app
crashes, the company intentionally crashed the app multiple times.
Partly, the move is over a contentious relationship
Facebook has with Google. The search engine giant alleges that the
social networking site deployed a series of apps within the app over
Google's terms of service for the Google Play store. Facebook wanted a
contingency plan in case the app was taken off of Google Play. Instead,
the app would come preloaded on Android phones through deals between
Facebook and phone manufacturers like Samsung.
Most of the article from The Information is about
the bickering between Facebook and Google, and the information about the
experiment is buried near the end. Amir Efrati writes:
Facebook has tested the loyalty and patience of Android users by secretly introducing artificial errors that would automatically crash the app for hours at a time, says one person familiar with the one-time experiment. The purpose of the test, which happened several years ago, was to see at what threshold would a person ditch the Facebook app altogether. The company wasn't able to reach the threshold. "People never stopped coming back," this person says.
Efrati also
notes that the company temporarily took the app out of the Google Play
store in some regions to test audience reaction, then providing a link
to those users on how to install the app through a backdoor in the
phones. There were some hiccups along the way, but the experiments
results weren't disastrous, according to an anonymous interviewee for
the story.
So yeah, Android users. There's why your Facebook app crashed.
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