Facebook late today issued a maintenance update to its primary iPhone and iPad client.
Listing only “bug fixes”, Facebook 13.1 would have probably slipped by unnoticed if it weren’t for a post over at the official Facebook Engineering blog which has detailed significant under-the-hood changes to fix a longstanding bug that caused unexpected crashes.
Long story short, code changes the team’s implemented have helped reduce the software’s crash rates on the iPhone and iPad by more than fifty percent…
The vast majority of the reported crashes can be attributed to a file corruption error in the iOS Core Data system, according to the blog post.
It took months to figure out the right angle to approach the problem from, the post notes, and recently, “we solved a long-term mobile debugging problem and reduced the crash rate for people using the Facebook for iOS app by more than 50 percent.”
More importantly, the fix has put a longstanding problem to rest.
Dealing with a large, rapidly evolving codebase can seem overwhelming at times. Everyday tasks like analyzing crashes and understanding code can turn into their own programming challenges. At these moments, it’s important to work together, brainstorm, and rely on computer programming fundamentals.
Here’s hoping they fix other issues and optimize Facebook for iOS because, frankly — it’s become such a resource hog that I use it only when a feature is missing in the Paper app.
Download Facebook 13.1 free in the App Store.
The 63.2MB download requires an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad running iOS 7.0 or later.
[via AllFacebok]