In the Graph API, which is "permission to set a custom tab"?

Question

Our application installs applications (or “tabs”) on the pages of our Facebook users. Our code has worked well for many years, but, as is usually the case with Facebook, it breaks all the time. Because, well, Facebook.

Some of our recent installation attempts no longer work with an error message that we have never seen before:

(#2069016) This page does not have permission to install custom tab 

As for Google, this question will be the first instance of this error message on the Internet ... So, I do not know what to do.

Any thoughts on what might be wrong?

For reference, the used page access tokens have the following areas (checked now):

 user_friends, email, read_insights, publish_actions, manage_pages, pages_show_list, publish_pages, business_management, public_profile 

Answer 1

According to the change log, this change is 90 days, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/changelog/version2.11/#gapi-90-pages

/page/tabs - Creating custom tabs using POST operations will only be available for pages with 2000 or more fans or pages managed by whitelisted applications. Existing user tabs will not be affected.

90 days compared to the release of API v2.11, which was November 7, 2017 - now you are starting to see the effects.

It sounds as if the dialog box for adding a page tab has not been touched (at least for me, I have not tested it yet) - therefore, introducing users to the application through the dialogue can allow them to easily install the application on their pages, perhaps give it. You can call it either through the FB.ui JS SDK or by redirecting the user to https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID &redirect_uri=YOUR_URL

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/pages/tabs#adding

Answer 2

As CBroe suggests, setting the page tab using the redirect method still works.

Edit: unfortunately they closed this loophole too

Answer 3

The status of the man page of the page tabs (highlighted added):

You can only create tabs on pages with 2,000 or more fans, or if you are an application developer with administrator rights on these pages.

So, if you are lucky that you personally have administrator access to the page (for example, you created a page, the owner of the page gave you administrator access, etc.), then you can still install applications, even if they are less than 2000 fans.

I believe this exception is provided to allow developers to develop applications (yes). However, this same feature allows us to install production applications on live pages.

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Note: my experience with this workaround was simply successful. This always works for me, but doesn't seem to work well for the other developers in our company. I have a theory why this is so. The experiments show that there may be another requirement - it looks like you may also need administrator rights for the actual application (page tab) that you are trying to install.

Answer 4

I have the same problem, but I found that all the fans are blocked by less than 2000 followers. I like that this is a problem or that sometimes it may not have less than the number of followers