Facebook kills off its ‘move fast, break things’ mantra

SAN FRANCISCO — At today’s Facebook developer conference, we got some interesting news for developers: They no longer have to worry about Facebook arbitrarily “breaking things” — such as, say, its APIs.

“We used to have this mantra, ‘Move fast and break things,'” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his keynote. “We were willing to tolerate a few bugs to [move fast]. But having to slow down and fix things was slowing us down. ‘Move fast with stable infra[structure]’ isn’t as catchy, but it helps us build better for the people we serve.”

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That translates to a two-year core API stability guarantee. Facebook is rolling out API version system, too, as well as a guarantee to fix all major bugs within 48 hours.

The overarching plan is to build the most stable, versatile mobile platform in the world — one that spans all operating systems and all hardware.

“We’re really focused on building a stable mobile platform,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s really annoying when we have to build the same thing three, four, five times across all these different platforms. … We all want identities and app installs and even monetization across platforms.”

We’ll have more coming soon from f8.