October 2013 Platform Changes

A year ago we started bundling Platform changes into quarterly migrations. Today, we are announcing the set of changes included in the October 2013 migration, available in the app dashboard today.

The following changes can be enabled/disabled using the "October 2013 Breaking Changes" migration in the app dashboard until October 2nd when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Game Achievement API update
Game Achievement action custom properties will appear in the 'data' field, and consistent with other Open Graph Actions.

/USER_ID/likes default update
Currently the API returns all likes by default. After the migration, fetching a user's likes via the Graph API will return 25 results at a time. We've added pagination to the results so you can page through to all of a user's likes.

/POST_ID/likes update
Apps will be able to retrieve all likes on a post (rather than the first 4 as it is today) through paging. As a result of the functionality update, the like count will be moved to the summary field.

Removing 'network' based privacy
As we have deprecated 'network' based privacy settings on Facebook, we are removing the network privacy field from Graph API and FQL. Currently if an app attempts to create a post with a network privacy, it will default to 'only me'. After the migration period, posting with a network privacy will result in an error.

Removing the ability to post to friends' timelines via API
We have found that posting content via API (stream.publish) on a friend's wall lead to a high incidence of user dissatisfaction (hiding content, blocking the app). After the migration period, posting content to friends' timelines via stream.publish will no longer be allowed. Please use the Feed Dialog for posting.

FQL and Graph API limit=0 change
Currently, we have a bug where limit=0 returns all results. After the migration period, specifying a limit of 0 in FQL or the Graph API will return zero results.

The following changes will go into effect on October 2, 2013:

Native iOS and Android apps must not use their own web views for Facebook Login
Native apps that implement Facebook Login by embedding their own web views inside their apps provide inconsistent and subpar user experiences. For example, users who are already signed in to Facebook on their devices must re-enter their Facebook credentials when logging in via custom web views. This results in a poor user experience as well as lower conversion for apps. In contrast, login flows provided by Facebook's official native SDKs allow people to skip entering their credentials. See our iOS and Android SDK documentation for more details.

To provide a better experience for all Facebook Login users, we are changing our policy to prohibit native iOS and Android apps from using custom web views for Facebook login.

Native iOS or Android apps initiating their own web views for Facebook login are required to use our official SDKs for login by October 2, 2013. Native iOS or Android apps using third-party SDKs that provide Facebook login via custom web views have an extension until January 8, 2014 to work with their third-party provider to resolve this or to migrate to our SDKs.

Some developers will receive Dev Alerts in the app dashboard when we detect usage of the changing features. However, we encourage all developers to validate apps with the migration enabled before the effective date to ensure functionality. Please see the Developer Roadmap for more info.