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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

As an iOS developer (and long time developer of apps dating back to early MacOS) I find it indefensible to have so many app crashes. This statements "As you may know, Facebook does not have big QA teams…we believe that developers are responsible for their own code, and they’re supposed to write the tests to do that." is total bullshit. I've seen this happen in multiple environments (big and small) over the years and it always results in crap results. QA/Test engineers are professionals at doing testing and should be testing continuously since day 1. It's nice the developers try to produce good code, but expecting them to be professional QA is ludicrous. My last large iOS app (previous employer) had a crash rate of 0.17% and we had awesome QA people who wouldn't let anything go out the door unless they were happy.

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I agree with you on the need for good dedicated test engineers, but even an apparently low crash rate can be damaging at scale. If you have 10,000,000 customers, a crash rate of 0.17% (over some unspecified time period) is 17,000 crashes (in the same time period). On the other hand, if the crash is deterministic, but caused by some user-specific state that affects 0.17% of your customers, that's 17,000 unhappy customers who are drastically more likely to post reviews than the potentially millions of happy customers not experiencing crashes (and perhaps reviewed the app positively years ago).

Note: I don't use Facebook's app often, and have no context for what the actual issues are.

True on volume, we only had about 15K users per day. Half the bugs were iOS issues we could do nothing about, and the most of the rest were data related which were out of our control (but we fixed when they appeared). It's just the QA statement that bugs me, Apple may have quality issues but they have a gazillion products, and FB has very few.

I think mobile is just too new to be good. It a wild west ghetto of terrible, terrible apps. I tried using Android and iOS as a desktop replacement only to be shocked by the poor quality of the best apps and being hamstrung by lack of features.

Mobile decision making is made mostly by consumers, not business. These devices are for people to play angry birds and check email. Android and iOS aren't under a lot of pressure to provide a stable and well audited environment. Sales are good, apps are selling, etc why rock the boat?

I think as these platforms mature things might change, but from what I can tell, there's still a major disincentive to move off the Windows ecosystem, especially when I can have a quasi-mobile experience with the Surface line. Its too much amateur hour in mobile. The post-PC cheerleading, it seems, was way premature.

It'd be a lot more manageable if Apple could simply provide memory guarantees to apps. It's not an unreasonable request. Having to close other apps or reboot the device to get an app to launch is frustrating for developers and users alike.

It's hard to do on mobile devices, there is no paging like a desktop system would have. I rarely have this issue though, maybe there are some apps that have more issues than others, or maybe it happens more on older devices. I do think iPhones need 2GB now instead of just 1.

I was going to include a snarky comment about wanting iOS to graduate to a big boy memory system like a big boy OS but decided to be more polite. :)

Rule of thumb is an app can allocate approximate 50% of total device memory before crashing. But there's no hard limit and it depends on your allocation pattern. If you request too much too fast it'll crash as well. Sometimes you have to let it fail and spin for 3 seconds trying to allocate again hoping it'll go through. Sometimes it will and sometimes it won't!

Or provide more than 1 GB of RAM for what is, effectively, a full blown computing device.

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