I am a developer and to use the marketing API I must have an app. I have this app and it is currently in development mode. Is it necessary to make this app public?
My initial thinking was 'no' and I have been successfully using the API via this app for a while now and have not experienced any limitations until recently. When trying to change the status of an Ad to active I got an error message that suggests the problem could be due to the app being in development mode.
FWIW I am able to successfully change Ad status to paused most of the time, however, more often when I try to activate an Ad, it fails, although it does succeed sometimes. As such, I believe I am using the API correctly. It seems to be more of an Ad state issue, or, perhaps an app state issue. Most of the time the error messages I receive from the API are not helpful. I did get one today that suggests the possibility that my app needs to be public.
Here is the error just in case it helps:
[{"code":400,"body":"{\"error\":{\"message\":\"Invalid parameter\",\"type\":\"OAuthException\",\"code\":100,\"error_data\":{\"blame_field\":\"targeting invalid fbid 141898914497\"},\"error_subcode\":1487133,\"is_transient\":false,\"error_user_title\":\"Can't Set Exclusion Targeting\",\"error_user_msg\":\"You may not be able to select a connection to exclude in your targeting because you're not an admin of this Page or app, or because the app is in developer mode, or the event is in the past. If you want to run your ad with exclusion targeting, please request admin access from the owner of the Page or app or move your app out of developer mode to link it to the ad. If you want to select an event for exclusion targeting, please make sure the event end time is in the future.\",\"fbtrace_id\":\"Dqzily7dOQa\"}}"}]
Thank you for any help or insight into this issue.
Just to resolve this, the answer is no, the app does not have to be public in order to use the API. The problem turned out to be an access permission issue on the account in question.