Balancing Speed and Reliability: The Double-Edged Sword of Third-Party Libraries

About this talk

Using third-party libraries in your apps can be a great way to save engineering time and move faster, but can also bring significant risk. If a library malfunctions and causes an outage, it may take days or weeks to get it solved for all your users. Apps have long update cycles and don’t have the luxury of hotfixes when something goes wrong. At Uber, as an app that people rely upon for making their income, getting to the doctor, or commuting to work, reliability in our app is the top priority. Learn how Uber decides when mobile libraries are safe to include and when they should be avoided.

We’ll review how Uber analyzes external libraries to reduce risk, walk through some horror stories when things went wrong, and discover some techniques that can help keep reliability for your user when the worst does happen. You’ll walk away with a tactical framework for evaluating libraries in your own apps.