alt Hacker NewsFirebase SDK is CRASHING ALLLL iOS Apps, since today morning
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Yeah, and pinning versions doesn't save you when the config comes from their server.
I remember first learning about Firebase when working on Android push notifications, a loooooong time ago (~2011 i think). Over time it grew into this full-featured app development platform, after an aquisition (don’t remember the name).
These days however it feels a bit neglected, and somehow poorly bolted on to GCP. I still have a few production apps running on it and news like this reinforces my belief that it’s in decline.
What are folks using these days that (ideally) is open source and self-hostable? I don’t want to lock in with another platform. Some of these apps use the offline sync feature of Firestore (apps used in basements and other low-connectivity areas).
Ugh.
That's the dark side of these types of dependencies.
But they provide a great deal of utility, so I can understand the attraction.
Exactly the same thing also happened in 2020 with the Facebook SDK:
Ironic. They could save others from crashes, but not themselves.
All iOS apps that are using firebase… It’s an important distinction.
Keep vibe coding and breaking everything.
This will be the new normal as all human “engineers” from staff to seniors are now down levelled to interns and junior engineers when using AI; unable to understand what they are doing and pushing broken updates like this into production with “agents”.
Better not blame Claude on this outage.
A friendly piece of vocabulary assistance: it's "this morning" ("today morning" is not correct English)
I was wondering why random apps kept crashing today. Good to know.
This is not the first time this has happened.
The more we insist on the idiotic idea that we can delegate all coding to agents and don't even need to read it anymore, the more such things will happen. And they will accelerate, as the hidden errors will compound.
If only there was any way to avoid this, right..? (I don't mean from Google's side, that as well, but that's not the point)
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I'm hearing an awful lot of "How could they do this to us?" and not a lot of "Wow, maybe we should have read some of this 3rd party code we bundled into 'ALLLL' of our apps"
Just an ignorant and naive outsider's take, but to me it paints a pretty damning picture of the state of mobile development.
At least Google engineers can invert a binary tree