I actually ripped out Smyte's Android SDK because of how bad it was and replaced it with my own implementation against their API which has a hard limit on retries. But I imagine that other customers were using their SDK and still have live apps out there using it... not good :/
We had 20 minutes notice, and then everyone was kicked out of the Slack support channel and API responses simply died. What the actual fuck. They have mobile client SDKs out in the wild that are now just eating up battery life as they retry an impossible query forever.
I am a developer of an app that makes use of Facebook friend permissions and have seen the various API changes they have made since 2014.
Applications using Facebook Graph 2.+ (which is the only option since Spring 2015 or so) who access friend data may only access data of friends who have also given consent to your app. So if A and C log into a Facebook app, and A is friends with B and C, the app can only be aware that A and C exist. This is true of legacy and new Facebook applications. It used to be possible to get basically everything about B (name, age, gender, photo, etc), but that all got shut down when Graph API 1.0 was discontinued. If this is somehow not the case for some Facebook apps that got special permission or there is a hack to get at the data, that would be a huge breach of trust.
> If there is never enough time to refactor and new features are always being pushed
That is a sign of bad culture, both in engineering and product. Whether its starting a green-field project in a scrappy startup or building yet-another-feature for an established product if the estimates are constantly redlining everyone's available time and never giving thought to maintenance, QA, testing, code review, and testing then of course it will always feel like that. When estimates include that stuff and you show product you can ship features more reliably more often in the long run, they buy into that. If they don't buy into that they are either very delusional, have only worked with absolutely perfect people, or they utterly do not care how many extra hours / stress the lack of quality causes you / the team / the company.
I'm unsure it is possible to translate the Netflix-Marvel series' success to non-Earth stories, let alone to Star Wars. To have the deep stories that you enjoyed they need enough screen time to tell the stories. The 4 individual stories + 1 miniseries of the Defenders is supposed to be about $200 million [1]. That comes out to 26 + 13 + 13 + 13 + 7? = 72, which is $2.7 million per episode. This uses mostly existing sets and straightforward special effects. Star Wars in particular is commonly set aboard complex spaceships or vastly different alien worlds in the company of aliens and robots. Therefore the investment required to initiate this seems like it would be significantly higher.
Game of Thrones, for context of a series with both well known actors and amazing sets and effects, is about $10 million per episode. If we assume that a Star Wars series would cost about the same and it would take approximately a similar number of episodes to tell such a story, that would be $720 million. I might be wrong, but I don't think such an investment in film has never been done before.
I think it will depend greatly on both the continued success of the Marvel TV shows + how the remaining Star Wars films perform.