Facebook backup plan would keep it running on Android

We eventually grew to accept them, forgetting nearly entirely that Facebook once looked totally different.

The company also decided to make the app unavailable from Google Play Store in a “small country” and, instead, told interested users to download the Android app on the Web.

For Facebook and Google, Android could be a battleground. The publication cites people with knowledge of the secret strategy as its sources of information.

According to tech website The Information, the USA firm secretly pushed out artificial errors within the Android app that would automatically crash it for hours at a time.

Facebook is on cordial terms with Google for now, but in case the relationship goes sour, the social networking giant already has a contingency plan, says a report from the The Information. One such app happens to be “Human”, which is an activity tracker that was launched on iOS back in September 2013, but has only now gotten an Android counterpart, after remaining iOS-exclusive for the best part of two and a half years.

That’s what Facebook is being accused of doing.

The AccuWeather app for Android is available free on Google Play.

If you don’t have the application yet, you can now download AccuWeather for Android for free via Google Play Store.

Word is Facebook has worked out how to handle in-app purchases which are usually handled by Google and even sussed out a way to developer notifications to Android phones without going through Google’s standard notification system.

The experiment was created to test at what point a Facebook user would give-up and ditch the Facebook app from their device all-together.

The Information also lets on that Facebook made its Android app unavailable to users in a “small country” for a week.

It has also created a feature to warn users if it suspects they are being spied on by government agents such as the NSA or GCHQ.

So how did this experiment fare?

“At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook”.

Alternately, Facebook could work directly in tandem with OEMs to have its app preloaded on the handsets.