New Delhi: Facebook, an app used by millions of users on tens of thousands of different mobile sets with different operating system. And surprisingly this app never hangs or slows down on any of the older smartphones and runs smoothly on all of them. Have you ever imagined how and why?
This is because a team of researchers is working diligently at its Oregon data center dubbed as the Mobile Device Lab to give each and every user the same experience irrespective of which device they are using.
The Lab has racks that can hold up to 60 devices and each rack can accommodate 32 smartphones, all of which are running a version of one of Facebook's many mobile apps.
According to The Verge, Facebook's Mobile Device Lab tests Facebook's software on older phones to discover whether any bit of a new code, no matter how minor, results in a dip in performance or poorer battery life.
"In total, Facebook has almost 2,000 handsets used to tell developers when they've screwed something up, and whether that degradation is only noticeable on an older phone," the report quoted Antoine Reversat, part of Facebook's production engineering team, as saying.
"When a developer makes a change, we build a new version of the app. We then install it here on one of the devices and check that the change didn't introduce regressions," Reversat added.
Facebook engineers worry that even the tiniest change in code could have unpredictable results in something as major as battery consumption.
(With ANI inputs)
