If you encountered an app that crashed frequently, would you keep using it? Chances are you wouldn’t, but that’s something Facebook has been trying to find out. According to a report from The Information (paywall; via Android And Me), it seems that Facebook has apparently been crashing its own Android app.
The purpose is to test their users’ loyalty. It seems that despite the app being made to crash on purpose, users kept coming back, and in some cases users even accessed Facebook via their mobile browsers in the event that the app did not work. But what’s the point of this, apart from just testing user loyalty?
The report claims that this was done so that in the event that Google were to one day decide to stop distributing Facebook via Google Play, or ban it completely (for whatever reason), Facebook could still ensure that they would get a steady stream of users even if they weren’t accessing the social network via its mobile app.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has conducted experiments on its users unknowingly. A couple of years ago, Facebook manipulated its News Feed to experiment with the feelings of its users, something that we’re sure that many users probably aren’t too thrilled about. We wonder how they will feel about this one. What say you?