Facebook App Review Approved

Close to four months ago, March 21st 2018, Marc Zuckerberg shared an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation. In line with this Facebook announced their plans on cracking down platform abuse. Part of this was to check more strictly how third party app developers access data on Facebook’s platform. Only a few days later, March 26th, Facebook announced a pause for app review while they implement the required changes to their platform.

About a month later, May 1st, in F8’s keynote, Facebook announced the re-opening of app review alongside their concrete changes coming in place. More importantly, Facebook set a deadline for August 1st, requiring all apps to be reviewed by that day.

Today, a couple months after the Cambridge Analytica situation, I am happy to announce that here at quintly we have successfully passed the app review by Facebook and Instagram. We are looking forward to work closely with both platforms over the coming years to make our customers lives easier. With this blog article I’d like to take a look back and share our view and challenges we have been facing during this time as a third party developer relying on Facebook’s platform.

Uncertainty arising from the Cambridge Analytica situation

I remember very well the days when the Cambridge Analytica situation arised. A lot of information was presented in the news. Many people not knowing about tech and how Facebook apps work had a hard time to really understand how this was possible. How did a company extract so much information from the Facebook platform to then sell it to third parties? Facebook was confronted with a difficult situation. At quintly I remember having had lots of discussions around that topic, especially what it will mean for us as a business, what it means for third party developers relying on Facebook’s platform in general.

I can share that with the first announcements from Facebook, and then following announcements covering more concrete plans how the app ecosystem for third party developers using Facebook’s platform will be affected, definitely raised a lot of uncertainty for us as a company relying on access to the Facebook platform. Our business is around helping organizations to use Social Media successfully and being fully focussed on company profiles (Facebook Pages and Instagram Business Accounts) and not personal profiles. Nevertheless, we were still confronted with changes coming to the Facebook platform and the uncertainty about whether we would still be able to access the data around our customers Social Media presences being so core to our business. We have been confronted with scenarios ranging from being completely cut off the platform, effectively losing the biggest part of our business, to much more positive scenarios and stricter rules about how to access data on Facebook’s platform contributing to more transparency and end-users gaining back trust in Facebook and its platform.

More confidence with further information shared

With further information shared by Facebook at their F8 conference and more clarity around what changes are coming to the Facebook platform, it came with a big relief on our side knowing the data points around company profiles will still be accessible, though use cases will be checked much more strictly during the app review. We strongly believe the steps taken by Facebook to avoid misusage of data will restore end-users’ trust in Facebook and third party app developers.

We have been intensively working on preparing the necessary review documents to prove how our solution benefits our customers and improves their user experience, explaining how we use access to concrete data points to offer a variety of features to our customers. It also helped us to clearly identify what data points are useful to derive meaningful action, and which ones we probably won’t even need access to because of little value in terms of outcomes.

With August 1st approaching, of course also we have been getting nervous, though we knew our use cases were fully covered according to the supported use cases provided by Facebook as part of their app review documentation (see the general documentation and requirements for permissions and additional features).

Final app approval – stability for our customers

We’re very happy just having passed the app review for both Facebook and Instagram and seeing how the much stricter checks during app review help professionalize the ecosystem for third party developers. We strongly believe that companies like us benefit from clear rules around how to handle and process data from Facebook’s platform. This ensures data breaches like the one we have seen in the Cambridge Analytica situation will never happen again as these bring harm to everyone – the end-user, Facebook and their platform, and also all the third party developers out there.

For our customers this also means we have set a solid base for the next years to come and we are looking forward to closely work together with Facebook to provide great service to our customers by helping them to use Social Media successfully.