Since the official Facebook for Windows Phone app is actually made by Microsoft, the official Facebook software developers obviously don’t keep track of it too well. This morning, Facebook must have changed something in the APIs that the Windows Phone Facebook app uses because now the app crashes consistently when trying to access comments or notifications. The reviews for the app have lit up with complaints about its new found crashing tendency. There haven’t been any recent updates to the Facebook for Windows Phone app itself, so the problem has to be somewhere on the back end. If the Facebook app connects through Microsoft’s servers first (which is unlikely), then it could be Microsoft’s fault. Regardless, hopefully a software update will be pushed out very soon since there are a lot of Windows Phone users out there that are angry with their Facebook app crashes.
The problem seems to affect only the Windows Phone 8 Facebook app version 4.2.0.0 as the Windows Phone 7.x version 2.7.0.0 doesn’t have the problem. If you are using Facebook 4.2 on Windows Phone 8 and are experiencing these crashes, be sure to restart the Facebook app and navigate to the Settings area in the “…” ellipses menu at the bottom, then swipe to the About panel and you will probably see an option to send the error report to Microsoft. The error report will be sent via email and you’ll have the chance to read exactly what is being sent before you press send. You might also want to post a comment in the Microsoft Answers forum as well.
UPDATE: It only took a day for Microsoft to release Facebook version 4.2.1 for Windows Phone 8 which fixes this problem. Bravo, Microsoft!
Originally published on Pocketnow on April 18, 2013.