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Comment by monocularvision | Hacker News Reader

This is a native SDK that is crashing the process. There is nothing an app developer can responsibly do to prevent or recover from this crash.

Other than remove the SDK, of course.

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Yes there is: a remote kill switch that prevents the third party SDK from loading. That puts you back in control of the software you’re shipping.

Fool me once, and all that.

You have to be technically competent enough to know how to dynamically load a framework, though.

For a tech company with a multi-billion dollar valuation this shouldn't be insurmountable

Facebook knows how dynamic loading works. (At least, I think so…) However, their many clients may not, as a lot are not multi-billion dollar companies.

And most SDKs are provided as static frameworks. You have to be technically competent to know how to wrap a static framework as dynamic, and then use dlopen to load them properly with a rather high one-time runtime cost. A mess.

So there is no way to try {} catch {} it, right?

Not in this case, as it's not code explicitly called by the client, but automatically loaded on app launch...

If it's an objective C exception, you can catch those with an objective c wrapper function. Ive done that before in my Swift projects.

Yes, but 1. it’s hard to inject that as the crash happens very early at launch and 2. Objective-C exceptions of this type are not intended to be caught.

That's not strictly true, and anyway it's different for the app developer versus a library provider. If you're making a 3rd party SDK that can throw, you need to make it can catch those throws.

NSInvalidArgumentException is not intended to be caught. You can, of course, but receiving one indicates a serious run-time error.

> Other than remove the SDK, of course.

Bingo! App developer voluntarily pulled in a dependency which they didn't fully understand. When you bring in a dependency, it's not still someone else's code/problem, it becomes your problem.

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