Facebook updating their Android app outside of Google Play for some users

For the past couple of days users have been seeing a download notification for a new Facebook build (140579 or 141046). The notification would get stuck for many folks, and reboots or battery pulls just caused another notification and stuck download. The whole thing pretty much acted like a clunky, amateurish malware attack.

It's not. The update is legit, and from Facebook. They are pushing out an update outside of the Play Store (which is a direct violation of the developer agreement, by the way) to some users to test new features. If you have the setting checked to allow installations from unknown sources (sideloading) you might have seen this. You also might still be stuck fiddling with the notification that won't go away. To fix that, hook up with some Wifi -- Facebook won't download the update while you're using your data connection.

Let's ignore that Facebook may be breaching their developer agreement. Lets also ignore that they are silently pushing software to a users phone, when that user is unaware and didn't ask for it. We'll also overlook the way Facebook thinks all Wifiis free and unlimited. But we can't overlook the fact that they let this go on for three days and still haven't posted a little something to their blog or dropped a little blurb in the Google Play app description to let the users -- you know, the ones who are worried what the hell this fake Facebook download is doing -- know what was going on.

Anyhoo, if you see the notification about it, just turn on your Wifiand it will overwrite your current Facebook app with something -- nobody knows exactly what, because Facebook hates change logs, too -- newer, and hopefully better.

Via: The Verge

Via: Facebook updating their Android app outside of Google Play for some users