I have been getting a lot of reports over the last week or so of people not being able to sync their contacts with HTC Facebook (Facebook for Sense). It happened shortly after I released a new rom for the Evo and Hero and I didn’t see others complaining about the issue so I assumed it was something related to what I did. As it turns out this is a widespread problem that has occurred after a Facebook API change, and HTC is working on it.



First off if you are having problems even logging in to Facebook and using FriendStream then there IS a workaround for that. Log in to your Facebook account on your computer and add a city (that Facebook recognizes) to your current job. This will fix the error where you get Service is Current Unvailable when adding HTC Facebook / Facebook for Sense UI and will fix FriendStream not working. This issue is well documented here, here, here, here and many others.


Now the bigger problem (which currently does NOT have a fix other than creating a new Facebook account) is syncing your contacts with Facebook. You can wipe your phone, reset your privacy settings, reset your phone’s cache, and Facebook for Sense will still tell you that you have no contacts. There is currently no fix or workaround for this, but it is acknowledged by Facebook and HTC. It is well documented here, here, here, here.


So… in short… I wasted 2 days trying to troubleshoot the issue thinking it was my fault; only to find out that it is a problem with Facebook. Now I can get back to working on other projects that I had to put on hold while I was messing with this. Ha. Next time I’ll just search Google first and not assume it was my fault. :)



Note: I wanted to add that this seems to only affect people who have restored their phone or deleted and then re-added their Facebook Sync account since this whole API issue started. Something on Facebook’s end is preventing you from syncing again (even if you go in and remove all mentions of Sense and Android in Facebook). If yours is working then you don’t have any reason to worry. Just don’t do a data wipe or delete your current sync account.



I decided to put up a debug log just for the heck of it. http://flipzmode.pastebin.com/jMYqnJcE. It’s giving error code 2000 which isn’t identified as a valid error according to Facebook’s current list of API errors.