Firebase SDK is CRASHING ALLLL iOS Apps, since today morning

ppranshuchittora about 4 hours ago 54 commentsRead Article on twitter.com

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Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

hzwanip•about 3 hours ago

At least Google engineers can invert a binary tree

pranshuchittora•about 2 hours ago

Lol, but they can't build BREW ;)

pranshuchittora•about 4 hours ago

Resolved - https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk/issues/16728#is...

lol768•about 3 hours ago

Resolved, but can still affect customers for up to 4 hours...

So many problems here, and no signs of an updated SDK that behaves properly on malformed input.

hnisjafx40•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, and pinning versions doesn't save you when the config comes from their server.

alex_suzuki•about 3 hours ago

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).

bcye•about 2 hours ago

Especially for offline sync Firebase is still much stronger than other all-in-one solutions.

The real alternative there would be to use some SQLite syncing solution and a different solution for auth and cloud compute.

teoruiz•about 3 hours ago

I guess Supabase is the obvious contender. It doesn't provide the actual frontend hosting though, which is a bit of a pain because now you have two problems.

ChrisMarshallNY•about 3 hours ago

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.

amelius•about 3 hours ago

I guess it's time Apple sherlocked Firebase.

jaen•about 2 hours ago

Exactly the same thing also happened in 2020 with the Facebook SDK:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097459

saagarjha•about 2 hours ago

Ironic. They could save others from crashes, but not themselves.

frizlab•about 1 hour ago

All iOS apps that are using firebase… It’s an important distinction.

rvz•about 3 hours ago

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.

redwood•about 2 hours ago

A friendly piece of vocabulary assistance: it's "this morning" ("today morning" is not correct English)

deergomoo•about 1 hour ago

It’s a common phrase in Indian English

illegalbyte2•about 3 hours ago

I was wondering why random apps kept crashing today. Good to know.

pranshuchittora•about 3 hours ago

But this is completely not acceptable from the Google

solarkraft•about 2 hours ago

They’ve been accepting this for years and so have users

yreg•about 3 hours ago

This is not the first time this has happened.

elzbardico•36 minutes ago

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.

nasretdinov•about 3 hours ago

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)

Skwid•about 3 hours ago

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.

skeledrew•about 2 hours ago

> maybe we should have read some of this 3rd party code we bundled

Not really practical though, if you push the thought to its limit. That 3rd party code is literally everything that's not written by you, from firmware to the launch UI. And if you don't push the thought to the limit then there's always that risk leading to the same "maybe we should've read X" if something happens in X. Trusting that others will be good stewards of all that 3rd party stuff is a hard requirement for making progress.

freakynit•about 3 hours ago

Mobile and frontend development, both, now-a-days contain way way way more dependencies than they should.