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Delivering important alerts about your app

November 15, 2012ByMin-Young Wu

Today, we’re introducing Developer Alerts, an important step toward making Facebook a more responsive and dependable platform. These alerts are a new way for developers to receive critical information about their apps via email and notifications on Facebook.com.

The people listed as admins and developers on an app will receive alerts in the following situations:

  • Breaking changes. If your app is using functionality that we’re changing or removing, you will be sent an alert at least 90 days before the change goes into effect. As a courtesy, we’ll also send reminders at 60, 30 and 0 days. Once you’ve enabled the respective migration, we will no longer send you alerts.
  • App status changes. If you have submitted Open Graph actions or created an app detail page for App Center, we will use Developer Alerts to notify you when the status of your submission changes. For example, we will send an alert when your Open Graph actions are approved.
  • Policy violations and enforcement. If your app doesn’t adhere to our Platform Policies you will be notified through these alerts. For example, if your app does not list a privacy policy, you will receive an alert telling you to add one before your app is forced into sandbox mode.

To help people easily manage and resolve issues with their apps, we thread alerts based on issue and date and we include links when an action is required. Also, because there may be multiple developers listed on a single app, we send a confirmation notification when issues are resolved.

Most developers won’t receive alerts very frequently, but when you do we hope you find them a helpful way to understand and track issues with your app. We're beginning to roll this out to apps today and plan to enable it for all apps in the coming weeks. We welcome your feedback in the comments below.