Facebook accused of deliberately breaking some of its Android apps

Social network ran experiment to see how long users would wait before giving up and going elsewhere, but people 'never stopped coming back'

Facebook's habit of experimenting on its customers has again led to anger, following allegations that it deliberately broke its app for a small number of users to see what they would do.

In a report from tech journal The Information, Facebook is accused of selectively crashing its Android app, for long periods of time, in an effort to discover the threshold at which users just give up and go away. But the lure of Facebook proved too strong: "The company wasn't able to reach the threshold," the site says, with someone familiar with the experiment adding that "people never stopped coming back".