Sure enough, when I had finished the design and finally got to prototyping, I realised that Facebook simply no longer allow access to the read_stream API endpoint, unless you get authorisation from them (seems like no one does). Info here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissions/v2.5#reference-read_stream

Fuelled by ingenuity, and because I had the design ready, I thought I'd try and simply load the user's news feed on a UIWebView, and read the data I need from elements in the DOM. I'm pretty sure this is against FB's ToS and wouldn't fly for long, but I kind of want to give it a go anyway.

I've gotten to a place where I've proven it works, but not always reliably and it's certainly hacky.

If you want to give it a go, load up https://m.facebook.com on your favourite browser, and then copy/paste + run the JS code in this jsFiddle (https://jsfiddle.net/Letwernb/), to your console.

It'll list whatever posts it finds on your feed, and give you some info on them. I believe at the moment I'm skipping ads and not so relevant posts, such as "friend shared a link".

I've also got a bit of code that lets me load more posts, until I've reached the 20 I need to display in the app.

I've got some challenges though. Like I said, it's hacky and relies on FB not changing certain class names, and because the date for each post comes as a string ("2 hours ago"), I need to find a way to convert that back to a timestamp so I can re-order the posts.

I thought I'd post here to get some thoughts on this approach, and maybe get some ideas on how to do it better.

Is this something you've tried before, or wanted to try? How would you have done it?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.