At the F8 conference in San Francisco today, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a two-year stability guarantee for all of the company’s core APIs and platforms. In fact, every API launched by Facebook will now be versioned, and developers will be able to choose which version to build on. In other words, Facebook will now give developers plenty of notice before breaking the functionality of their apps.
At the same time, Zuckerberg committed that his company will fix all major bugs within 48 hours as part of a new service level agreement (SLA). He noted that Facebook usually fixes most bugs faster than that, but two days is the guaranteed timeframe.
The move is part of a broader “stability” theme that Facebook’s CEO emphasized at the start of his keynote. In fact, he said the company has recently moved away from its “Move Fast And Break Things” mantra. He joke that “Move Fast With Stable Infra” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it’s a necessary change.
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The former worked well when Facebook was a small company, but now that it is a behemoth, going back and fixing everything it breaks just slows it down even further. Zuckerberg says his company is now much more focused on “building the cross-platform tools to build, grow, and monetize your apps – everywhere.” That makes sense to say at F8, which the company emphasized multiple times is all about developers this year.
Zuckerberg also revealed that F8 will be an annual event going forward. With Parse under its wings for more than a year now, Facebook wants to refocus on developers so it can continue to grow as a platform, especially focused on mobile.
See also – Facebook announces new granular permissions and anonymous logins for third-party apps
Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/GettyImages
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