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by tersers 2248 days ago
To an extent due diligence is required of any library, but there must always be some guarantees for the benefit of the developer. It's unreasonable to expect a developer to accommodate for the failure of any SDK call.
2 comments

> It's unreasonable to expect a developer to accommodate for the failure of any SDK call.

This is not even remotely close to unreasonable. In fact, it is the opposite. Doordash, Uber, Lyft etc. are completely dead on arrival due to a remote bug that could have easily been protected against.

During SDK initialization, if shit hits the fan, pull the chute and inform the user that things cannot proceed. Easy as pie. If you do not have that level of control or the foresight/wisdom to implement, well yep you are going to be the victim of a situation like this. And if you are the mobile lead at any of the aforementioned companies I can guarantee your head is gonna be on a stick by 5pm.

Multiple comments are commenting that even with a try/catch, the error still crashes the app.

From https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment39

> This happens even with a MapView.onCreate call for me, even when encased in a try / catch error. So beyond the fact that Google Maps isn't working, the Google Maps library isn't handling the error throwing properly and is bypassing the app's ability to catch errors.

From https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment86

> instead of crashing the app even though try/catch is used and this cryptic message cited above.

Sure, but if your business is broken because of a 3rd party library, I'd sooner be looking at patching the bytecode than to write breathless "me too but we are very important" in the bug tracker.
> patching the bytecode

Tell that to the developers who barely grasp that the JVM exists.

But yeah, the degree of helplessness people engineer themselves into without a second thought is absurd. I guess it's a blessing that the Play Store isn't embedding the Maps SDK and crashing before it can update the Maps SDK heheh.