Greetings fellow chigeeks – yes, yes! we know it has been quite some time + things have gotten all out of sorts but recent misfortune has brought forth our need to rant + rave (as we’ve felt one coming forth + building momentum). You see, as of late, our fellow friend + newly-christened favorite foe (we’re talking FACEBOOK here) has littered our lives with countless disruptions which culminated in alas the greatest of technical fouls! What’s that you may ask? Simply put…our precious phones got bricked!
For those of you who think a brick is something that goes into an old St Louis building, let us allow the crowd over at urbandictionary to enlighten you.
As verb: to brick something. This is the action of rendering any small-medium size electronic device useless. This can happen whilst changing the firmware, soldering or any other process involving either hardware of software.
Now, we’ve done this before many times in the past BUT we were wholly responsible as it was usually the result of our own tampering (e.g. trying to jailbreak a device or deep mod it in order to get better control over it). But this time, we swear we are innocent! So heads up + be warned – this time it was a simple act of updating the Facebook iphone app! Make sure to check out the accompanying screenshots to take a peek.
facebook loading...or maybe not!
So as is standard with most mobile devices now, we were updating our iPhone apps in a batch when Facebook got stuck in the installation screen (it sat for at least 15 minutes or more). The natural next move would be a restart, right? Well – hello + welcome bricked iPhone…it was stuck in a state of eternal restart! It would just cycle + cycle + not turn off or turn off intermittently only to power back up again later unexpectedly. This all happened en route to a meeting so we weren’t able to do much more than try rebooting, hard + soft resets + cursing at the phone. Back at desktop, we tried syncing it with iTunes – NO DICE, it was unrecognizable to the computer (didn’t even register as a connected device via USB).
So there we were…with brick a in hand. Not having the time to deep dive into the situation, an appointment was made stat for the genius bar. Now get this! Miraculously, en route, the phone comes back to life (sans the Facebook app)!
At this point you may be asking “what’s the bottom line of this rant, young chicgeek”?
Here tis in edible bulleted form:
- There was a serious lack of quality control/assurance (QA) on behalf of both Facebook + the app store. Our experience was not unique + a quick search turned up countless others in addition to looking at the most recent comments on the app store.
- Poor communication with the customer. It was later brought to out attention that there was a warning with the update which stated that one should first uninstall the existing Facebook app before upgrading. The problem here lies in the fact that many peeps perform batch updates (that is many apps at once) + thus don’t get the chance to read every update screen for each app. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have alerted the end user with a pop-up window during the installation process or, better yet, beforehand?
- Yet another example of Facebook’s rush-to-the-market mentality. As of late Facebook has thrown more changes + updates at the user than reruns of My Cousin Vinny!
- Think twice before just accepting an update on your phone. Perhaps even read other customer feedback first – that way you won’t end up being the one complaining later!
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