Real time checkins stop working after app is uninstalled and reinstalled

Question

We are working on an iPhone app that uses Facebook's realtime checkin data. We noticed that if we uninstall the app and reinstall the app, we see one of the two issues:

1. Facebook realtime updates stop working for some users. i,e, our servers receive no checkin notifications from Facebook when user checkis-in. It all works well before user uninstalls the app.

2. Facebook sends realtime updates, but when we try to retrieve checkin data, we get empty result set:

Query: (using the appropriate auth_token)

/me/checkins 

Response:

{
    "data": [
    ]
}

Data is empty when we test from debug tool as well.

More info:

• We use a "Deauthorize Callback URL", which points to a specific URL on our server, and we do return a success back to Facebook upon invocation of that URL.

• User is prompted for the appropriate permissions upon reinstalling the app. (Permissions used: publish_actions).

• We did verify that the app is allowed to use Facebook (iPhone->Settings->Facebook).

• When user logs into Facebook on a web browser and selects the app from "Your Apps" section, we do see proper permissions.

• We did verify the permissions from Open graph debug took as well. They look alright.

Any idea what might be going on here?

Answer 1

Regarding #2, contrary to what Facebook says in https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/checkin/, the 'user_checkins' permission is needed. If you use the permission 'user_status' the checkin data array is empty.

This smells like a facebook bug.