Why developers are leaving the Facebook platform

Why <i>some</i> developers are leaving the Facebook platform.<p>I'm working on a thing right now that's integrated with Facebook, and I'm excited about it.<p>The problem author mentions are all legitimate, but only applicable to a certain category of apps - and I think both users and Facebook alike are of the opinion "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out".<p>We're talking about the spammy apps that try to take over your news feed, and that constantly overshare in an attempt at "virality". Social networking is maturing, and users are no longer lambs to the slaughter of these shitty apps, and Facebook won't stand for them either.<p>Author complains about the lack of virality and acknowledges that many of the normal routes to virality are now cut off. Thank God. Let's be honest, when developers say "virality" they don't mean "something so interesting and cool that you must share it with everyone", they mean "something annoying, like that kid in class that stands up and shouts at people every 20 seconds".<p>Apps that offer actual social value to their users, who aren't 100% reliant on Facebook for user base, are fine. As are <i>actual</i> viral things - you know, stuff that's interesting and fun that encourages people to share (see: The Oatmeal's Facebook feed).<p>I for one am glad that parasitic apps are leaving the Facebook ecosystem. There's now more room for developers who offer real value to users. The thesis here seems to be "I can no longer be a parasitic bad actor in this ecosystem!", to which my response is "someone call the waaaaaahmbulance".

Why developers are leaving blogs and websites that throw up popup windows like it's 1997:<p>Because it's incredibly irritating;<p>Because it interrupts you when you've just started to read;<p>Because the popup-tastic 90's are a time nobody wants to relive;<p>Because (in this case), closing the popup actually seemed to reset the scroll location too;<p>Because it can totally FU browsing on mobile; (but who cares about mobile anyway? We're supporting people from 1997 maaan!)<p>Because it's obnoxious.<p>I decided a few weeks ago that I would no longer read any sites, articles or blogs that do this. I am Jack's bounce rate.

Hi, I'm Doug Purdy, Director of Developer Products at Facebook. I wanted to weigh in here to explain how we think about some of these things.<p>Successful iOS and Android developers are integrating Facebook into their mobile apps. It's not an either/or equation. In fact, as of this month, more than 81% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps and 70% of the top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook.<p>All categories of developers continue to build with Facebook (fitness, books, music, games, etc.) with over 10 million apps and websites integrated with Facebook. Notably, games continues to be an extremely popular category – more than 250 million people play games on Facebook each month, and canvas installs have gone up 75% in the past year. Most of our games developers had record years in 2012, and over 100 of these developers made more than $1M in 2012 (in total, we paid out more than $2B to games developers in 2012).<p>With regard to Platform policies, for the small number of apps that violate our policies (replicate our functionality, fuel their app's growth at the expense of people's experience or expectations) we take action as needed. But for the vast majority of developers building great social apps, keep doing what you're doing.<p>Our goal is – and has always been – to give people a convenient way to login to apps, create personalized and social experiences, and let people share the things they care about through the apps they use.

From strictly an engineering perspective, I stopped developing for FB a few years ago because their API was like quicksand that you stepped in by chance because your treasure map was so bad. It would change every week, it was buggy, poor or no documentation, different standards coming and going every week with no signal as to which one FB would settle on, and no warning when their changes would break things. Maybe things have improved since then, but I left that experience so scarred that I'm never touching their dev tools again.

Developers are leaving Facebook platform because people are sick of third party apps on Facebook. When I visited my dad, I spent an hour getting rid of all the spammy apps that were clogging his newsfeed. There is little value provided by those apps to most people I know.<p>And as for Facebook itself , I have spent thousands of dollars buying stuff online -- books, bags , h/w , s/w,etc., and yet when I login to Facebook, I am greeted with ads for match.com ads or other dating sites. Note to Facebook: there is no point showing dating ads to people who are searching for deals on Graco , Lego and miscellaneous school supplies.

He left out an important reason: That Facebook can and will ban apps at will, regardless of whether or not they have actually done anything wrong. IMO, that's probably where the "uninvestable" comment mentioned in the article came from. If you have to wake up every morning wondering if your app that had X million users last night is still alive, that's a big problem.<p>I know of apps that have been banned because malicious actors were using access tokens from those apps to do spammy things even though the app itself wasn't sending those requests. Facebook returns access tokens in the URL upon authorization, so the user is exposed to it and can use it for anything they want. Given nothing more than an app ID, any user can send spam posts and make it appear to have come from any app they choose. This includes Facebook-owned apps.

I couldn't read the article. i'm on my mobile and in most cases modal windows make the page unresponsive. People really need to stop using modal windows in this way if they want to keep their audience. /endrant

"Move fast and break things" is a fucking terrible philosophy in a team that is building a "platform" for other companies to use. Its no wonder that even the features that are still "supported" never fucking work properly, if the developers writing the code know their little piece of the Shit Pie will be removed or replaced in a short time frame anyway.

The Facebook API is, by far, the worst API I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. I'm not sure whose API would be second, but it would be a very distant second. They don't follow any kind of versioning, randomly remove or break existing features, don't respond to bug reports, and have absolutely horrid documentation.<p>If working at Facebook on the Facebook.com codebase is anything like working with their API, it's a wonder anyone would want to work there.

Most of what was written here is true of all platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, iOS and Android.<p>- In the beginning, there are few rules and so it's the wild west. Developers see what they can get away with.<p>- As time goes on, platforms look at what uses of it pose a key threat to their core product (e.g. social graph, twitter client, payment platform, third-party engines, etc.) Those threats will be extinguished. Developers dependent on those key threats will be burned as they get shut down.<p>- Ad rates when the market is empty will always be cheaper than when the market becomes crowded.<p>- Competition makes it harder for smaller devs to survive. Remember the days when you could be an indie developer and have a chance at succeeding on iOS? Now all the big guys chart and the small guys don't make squat.<p>- The part about mobile is true but this is affecting ALL web platforms, not just FB.<p>Yes, Supercell got a huge investment but they are the exception, not the rule. They are the "Zynga of iOS" if you will (in the context of success/investment). The question is whether we'll see more of these kind of investments. Given that games is a hits-based business, I'm guessing it'll still be pretty rare.

I think the problem is bigger:<p>All the big platform websites readjusted their strategy back to become destination sites.<p>All what we notice (eg less impact even during new-feature-landgrabs) is just a symptom of this.<p>eg: Twitter, Facebook, even Google (see search api), etc etc<p>All started out as platforms. Now all of them focus rather on monetization on-site.<p>I remember a talk of a facebook engineer who said once "facebook.com is just one of the many websites on the fb platform - it is of minor importance - the platform is the social layer of the internet".<p>Back then I personally assumed their main revenue channel will become micropayments (which would go align with the platform strategy). But it didn't happen and i couldn't imagine hearing a similar quote anymore today.

I swore that I would never make a Facebook app 2 years ago when Facebook broke my app without any reason or explanation 3 times.<p>Check out the bug tracking system on their developer portal, there are tons of bugs which they just ignore.

Where are the numbers to support that developers are in fact leaving?<p>Just because a few VCs in SV aren't investing in Facebook based startups, doesn't mean developers/startups are leaving in droves.

Is there anyway to turn off the share buttons when highlighting text? I like to highlight text when I read, and the share buttons coming up makes the article unreadable. I'm probably the exception here, but that is really frustrating.

It is a naive dream to think that there is a symbiotic partnership with Facebook. The power relations are evident and a Facebook app developer is at the bottom of the food chain.<p>It is also obvious that you never can rely solely on a 3rd party (without explicit contracts) to build your business on. [Unless you can make a lot of money very quickly but than you can as well go to Las Vegas.]<p>There is just too much wishful thinking. It is not that Facebook, Google or Apple is evil. It is ultimately about the interests and when there are confrontations you have to hold the right cards in your hands. Begging is not really a good business option.

David Weekly has a tough road ahead of him as the new Developer Program liaison at facebook.<p>This article seems to focus more on canvas apps, rather than offsite apps (which is what I see more of these days). Andrew is right on most of these points, my company used to build tons of bespoke facebook apps for people, not anymore. Seems like wildfire cashed out at the right time.

Because FB are privacy disrespecting? That's a good enough reason to leave it for developers and users alike.

Many users are also "once bitten, twice shy" about using facebook apps at all. A lot of people have trouble telling the difference between a simple facebook oauth login and a full-fledged spammy app, and are reluctant to use the former for fear that it will turn out to be the latter.

FYI: That newsletter popup is really annoying. I only clicked through because it's a top post on HN.

I am glad to read this because it validates so much of the trends I've been seeing over the last two years. More and more people are starting to realize that there's a need for an alternative to the Facebook Platform. This article is just the latest of many realizing that there's a big demand for developer-friendly platforms that get it right.<p>In my opinion, it can be done way better completely outside of facebook, and you get to own your own users. I am going to write an article actually about this, and post it here.<p>For now: <a href="http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21" rel="nofollow">http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21</a>

I think it's hard to argue with a lot of the points he raises. Certainly the 'lack of virility' is an issue and it's much harder to get significant gains now without resorting to a few hacks. The most concerning point I think has to be the case where Facebook denies advertising to competing products. That would suck if it happened!!!<p>Again hard to argue with many of the points raised, but with that said I think there's still opportunity - just not the same as before where the likes of Zynga and iLike were able to get shed loads of traffic for virtually nothing.

Something seems off about the premise of the article, and I think it's that you should start developing with a <i>platform</i> in mind at all. If you want to actually build a business, wouldn't it be better to start with a <i>problem</i> and figure out how to solve that, and then the platform is just a distribution channel you use to get your solution in front of the users who need it. Choice of a platform falls out of where the users who have your problem tend to spend most of their time.

I think an overarching issue is that the goals of FB developers are different from the goals of FB itself.<p>As a result, FB is keenly focused on keeping its feed and request channels relevant and trimmed down, while developers would rather use the channel to blast as many people as possible. That's also why Facebook is fine with breaking stuff for its developers if it makes the customer experience better.

Interesting essay overall, but I don't think 'arbitrage' means what you think, in " and arbitrage it against their virtual goods or ecommerce businesses."<p>Unless, maybe, there were somehow middlemen buying facebook ads and then reselling them to someone else, that's not 'arbitrage' (and even then, questionable).

I have seen an increase in Facebook platform integration. From small businesses looking to get an advantage over the competition. Its no longer about some social media app. Now its about Mary's Pizza, and how they want to spam the feed of their clients whenever they order. It works.

I like the potential of facebook apps.<p>Did this a while back<p><a href="http://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/" rel="nofollow">http://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/</a><p>I would be perfectly fine paying for access to their app platform if it would give me a more stable environment and allow me to access a few things I can't access right now.

I was working on the social integration on a project. The hell that the backend coder and I went trying to make work the js sdk for facebook was just stupid. We ended using a python lib for facebook integration. A real shame such a big company releasing a crappy sdk.

This post inspired me to write about our platform, which addresses this exact issue. If you're fed up with facebook platform, you might enjoy the read:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5593216" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5593216</a>

There's really just one major reason - people used facebook API to get access to people's contacts but now mobile apps can do the same thing simply by crawling people's contacts list. This obviates the need for apps to play within Facebook's rules.

They're leaving the Facebook platform, because Facebook wasn't a platform up until very recently. It was a communal toilet of shoddy, spammy apps that did add any value to the experience or the brand. Good riddance!

Whoops, site looks down for me. In the meantime, here's a gist with the blog post text in it: <a href="https://gist.github.com/nbashaw/5437100" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/nbashaw/5437100</a>

"a lot has evolved" for "a lot has changed" - faux-smart business english?

&#62;platform companies like Facebook, iOS, Android<p>I stopped reading right there.

I feel facebook has become less "cool" and more "commodity". it is still a great place, but its best growth is over.

Where is the mention of the users?<p>Most people I know, myself included, barely tolerate facebook. Facebook is quickly becoming the platform of the middle-aged mom (because middle-aged dad is often lacking computer literacy skills) who wants to repost image macros that we've all seen on reddit three months ago.<p>From the user perspective, Facebook just isn't a pleasant experience any more.

Why I am leaving this website: A popover asking me to sign up for your newsletter.

meh....some of us never started getting in to the facebook platform :)

Thanks Andrew, nice article. Finally someone writes something about the facts.

Good read!