Apps that are rely on an old version of Facebook’s developer tools will be facing a great transformation starting on April 30. Starting Thursday, the social networking giant will begin transitioning apps that rely on older versions of its Graph and Login APIs to new versions of those tools that were announced at the company’s F8 developer conference last year.
While Facebook has spent the past year encouraging developers to move over to the new system and developing systems to make the transition as painless as possible, there will be some apps left out in the cold. The new Login API carries a number of benefits for users, including the ability to more granularly control what information from their Facebook profiles they share with app developers. That means users will have a chance to elect to provide fewer permissions than they were ordinarily required to.
“It’s important because if people don’t feel comfortable logging in with Facebook, we don’t have a platform,” Simon Cross, a product manager at Facebook, told a group of journalists at a press conference.
In addition, apps that haven’t been through Facebook’s Login Review process will have their access to data restricted to a user’s email address, public profile and list of friends until after app developers request that Facebook go over the way they integrate with the service.
That has the potential to break apps that aren’t prepared to get less information from Facebook than they were expecting, or those that rely on data that Facebook will no longer provide under the new APIs, like data from friends’ profiles and the ability to chat using the XMPP protocol.
This change has been a long time coming. Facebook announced the changes to the login system at its F8 developer conference last year, and developers had 12 months to make the changes necessary to keep their apps up to date and get them through review. Cross emphasized that the company has been providing support and reminders to developers around the transition.
While the transition will begin on Thursday, it will take a few weeks for all of the apps to get moved over.