Facebook will no longer let apps automatically post to your profile

Some apps will lose their ability to start a Facebook Live broadcast on your behalf

Reading Time:2 minutes

Published: 2:00pm, 25 Apr 2018Updated: 1:54pm, 25 Apr 2018

By Matt Weinberger

It’s a pretty common annoyance: You use Facebook to log in to a new app, and you forget to change your settings. Later, you find that the app has posted on your timeline, for all the world to see.

Well, that particular problem is not much longer for this world, as Facebook announced that it’s no longer letting apps post to your profile, at all.

The change goes into immediate effect for new apps, while existing apps will retain their posting permissions until August 1st of this year. In lieu of automatic posting, Facebook is urging developers to focus on share buttons, where a user has to knowingly click to post a link, photo, or other content to their profile.

This is a big change for Facebook: Automatically posting to profiles has been a big part of Facebook’s app platform across much of its 11-year history, and some developers are likely to get caught flatfooted by this change.

Facebook announced other changes to its developer platform, as well. Another big one is that Facebook will only let certain, pre-approved apps start a Facebook Live video broadcast on your behalf. This means that many existing third-party apps with Facebook Live features are about to lose that functionality. This, too, may catch some developers off-guard.