- Facebook is resuming the review process for apps and bots to use its platform.
- The program was paused after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The move stunned developers, some of which relied on it for their livelihoods.
- It's now being reinstated, but some developers still feel uneasy.
- The incident highlights how Facebook doesn't just need to placate its userbase — it needs to keep its developers happy too.
SAN JOSE, CA — Mark Zuckerberg is giving the people what they want.
The 33-year-old chief executive opened Facebook's annual developer conference F8 with a much-needed announcement: It has ended a moratorium on approving new apps on its platform, which was instituted in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The move comes alongside a bevy of new features and products for developers as the social network attempts to shift the conversation away from its scandals — from a dating service that will go up against Tinder, to tools for big businesses to use WhatsApp.
Maintaining the moratorium would have been a nightmare for F8: How do you have a developer conference if no developers' apps are being approved? So it's no shock that the news was greeted with resounding cheers. The mood at the conference has been fairly upbeat, as Facebook pushes the line that it won't stop building new products while it fixes its old ones. "We will keep building," Zuckerberg declared in his keynote speech.
But some developers are still wary, and the episode points to a broader challenge Facebook faces. It isn't just trying to placate users, in the wake of its string of scandals — it needs to convince its developers, too, to bet big on Facebook.
Relieved — but uneasy
Andrew Magliozzi is the CEO of AdmitHub, a startup that builds chatbots for universities and colleges to provide information to students. Each new customer requires a new version of the bot tailored to the institution. When Facebook paused the approval process, it meant that AdmitHub couldn't make any more bots, stalling out its business.
In an email, Magliozzi said he was "relieved" by the news, but still has "unease that conditions are likely to change again before long."
He went on: "Their track record of whimsical behavior suggests Facebook conditions are going to change again — likely in inconvenient ways at inopportune times. The trouble is the utter unpredictability."
Another developer working on the Messenger platform, who asked not to be identified, told Business Insider that they believe the reversal "kind of solidifies my previously stated opinion that the Facebook lawyers really didn’t know what they were doing and it was more of a knee-jerk reaction to shut everything down, quick."
They added: "I’m relieved it turned out ok [...] but this kind of behavior (blanket moratorium on api) is not conducive or good for business. "
'We literally had to do what we had to do'
Many developers are less wholly reliant on the Facebook platform — and so have been less affected by the post-scandal privacy tweaks the social network implemented.
Alexandru Iliescu, CEO of language-learning app Mondly, told Business Insider that he was impressed with the presentation of the event, and that he looks forward to trying the new augmented and virtual reality functionality Facebook showed off at the event. He did, however, note he would have liked more guidance on how many units Facebook intends to ship of the new, $199 Oculus Go headset, as its adoption will affect Mondly's ultimate approach to VR. Facebook is staying mum on that number.
And there's plenty of new tools for the developer community to get their teeth into, from integrating their products into Instagram Stories to building stickers for WhatsApp — even if there weren't any outlandish, space-age projects like the 2017 announcement that Facebook wanted to read minds and let users hear through their skin. Multiple attendees spoke excitedly about Journeys, a new analytics tool for developers that Facebook announced at the conference.
In an interview, Facebook Messenger's head of product Stan Chudnovsky said Facebook's message to developers following the review moratorium is that it will "try not to do it again."
"Developers want stability and developers want predictability, and we are committing on delivering that to them," he said. "They understand a small number of developers were not behaving appropriately and so we needed to get [the] platform to where it needed to be ... we tried to talk them through that process and we tried to make sure they know what's going on and what's going to happen."
He added: "But obviously there was no way to make it be nice for them, because we literally had to do what we had to do."
