How Facebook Wasted An Hour And A Half Of My Life

Now it should be admitted up-front that in fact, taken as a whole, Facebook has in fact wasted far more than an hour and a half of my life. But all the other hours and halves, I at least felt it was my choice to waste them. This time, however, it was definitely Facebook’s choice instead — or Apple’s.

The problem started when Facebook for Iphone refused to do anything, showing only the message “This version of the Facebook application is no longer supported. Please upgrade to version 3.0.”

Despite having always thought that the whole point of web applications, or websites in general, is that you design them carefully-enough to start with that you can support old URLs or clients in the field indefinitely — you can’t, after all, reach out and rewrite everyone in the world’s bookmark files if you want to change a URL — I consoled myself that at least updates to Facebook for Iphone are free, so went off to the Iphone App Store to download the newer version. But that failed too: apparently version 3.0 of Facebook for Iphone required at least Iphone OS 3.0, and mine was still on 2.2.

Upgrading the OS on a jailbroken Iphone can be stressful, but I thought that, as Facebook was pretty much the only Iphone application I actually used, even the worse-case scenario of bricking the phone and going back to the Nokia 8890 wouldn’t lose me that much. It turns out that the procedure for upgrading a jailbroken Iphone to OS 3.1.2 is as follows:

• Find out how. I’m not even including the finding in the hour and a half.
• Reboot, because it only works from MacOS.
• Download Pwnagetool, BL-3.9, and the IPSW. (I always think that the file icon for IPSW files ought to be a blue scarf, but it isn’t.)
• Try and download BL-4.6, but the link doesn’t work.
• Go and fetch BL-4.6 on a USB stick from the Windows laptop you last did an Iphone upgrade from. (This is actually an improvement over the previous process, which only lets you know you’ll need the BL files halfway through the upgrade itself.)
• Run Pwnagetool, which immediately stops because you need at least Itunes 8 for the “restore from specific IPSW” feature, and you only have Itunes 7.
• In Itunes, run “Check for updates”, which runs the system Software Updater program, which offers loads of nonsense. Untick everything except Itunes, and download and install it.
• Run Pwnagetool again, which now does everything it needs to and creates the custom IPSW.
• Put the Iphone into recovery mode.
• Run Itunes, which refuses to start because it needs Quicktime 7.5.5 or later.
• Go and find Software Updater (it’s in System Preferences) and run it again. Untick everything except Quicktime, and download and install it.
• Reboot, because the Quicktime installer demands it.
• Put the Iphone into recovery mode again because it’s fallen out of it during the reboot.
• Re-run Itunes, and have it tell you “Itunes could not contact the Iphone software update server because you are not connected to the internet.”
• Click on “More information” about this “no internet” error, and watch it open a web page in Firefox to tell you about it.
• Start to wonder whether Apple are just deliberately messing with your head in order to scold you for jailbreaking their phone.
• Unplug the network cable from the Mac and plug it directly into the router, bypassing the HTTP proxy.
• Reconfigure both MacOS and Firefox not to use the proxy.
• Quit and re-run Itunes, because there’s no obvious way of telling it to rescan for devices.
• Actually install the upgrade, which takes ages to “prepare”, much of which time you spend eyeing the old Nokia 8890 which never caused you any of these problems.
• Once the Iphone restarts, observe with relief the little magnifying-glass icon that 2.2 didn’t have, thus providing evidence that the upgrade actually did something. Also notice that it’s rearranged all your icons; arrange them back the way you like.
• Install the Facebook application from the Iphone App Store.
• Open “Contacts” and realise that in fact the upgrade has wiped all your user data.
• Notice with relief that Itunes is now asking you whether to restore the Iphone from a backup.
• Notice with alarm that the backup in question is from 2008.
• Restore from the backup anyway because it’s got to be better than nothing.
• Rearrange all your icons back the way you like them again.
• Reinstall the Facebook application from the Iphone App Store, because the restore restored the old version.
• Unplug the network cable again and plug the Mac in back behind the firewall where it belongs.
• Reboot back into Linux.
• Start wondering what important phone numbers you’ve obtained since 2008.