I hate Meta. Not the company in some abstract sense, their developer portal specifically.
Here's what I was trying to do: pull my Instagram and Facebook posts into my portfolio, the same way I already did with YouTube. The YouTube integration went smoothly enough, I already have it connected and showing on my site. So naturally I figured Instagram and Facebook would be a similar afternoon project.
It was not.
Testing is easy, production is a different story
Tinkering around on Meta's developer page, getting something working for testing purposes was actually fine. But the moment I wanted to pull my actual account's posts for real, in production, I hit a wall. Meta splits access into tiers: Standard Access covers accounts you own or manage yourself, but anything beyond that, serving other users or scaling past a handful of test accounts, requires Advanced Access. And Advanced Access requires both Business Verification and a full App Review, meaning a registered business presence and a formal review of exactly how your app uses each permission it requests.
Then there's the OAuth flow itself, which comes with a maze of roles and permissions you need to configure correctly before Meta will even let your app request the right data. If you've never touched their developer portal before, none of it is intuitive. I don't think it's impossible, I just think it's built for teams who already know the ecosystem, not for someone trying to bolt a personal API integration onto a portfolio site on a weekend.
Meanwhile, Google
The frustrating part is the comparison. Google's developer console has a reputation for being confusing, and it genuinely can be, there's a lot to click through and a lot of settings buried in odd places. But it was never this hard to actually configure something and get it working. And when I got stuck, their AI assistance built into the console actually helped me find my way through instead of leaving me to guess.
I get why Meta locks things down this tightly. My best guess is it comes down to security and platform abuse prevention, since Instagram and Facebook data is a much bigger target for scraping and misuse than a YouTube feed. That's a reasonable reason to have guardrails. It just means, for now, I can't get my Instagram and Facebook posts integrated into my portfolio the way I wanted to.
YouTube stays connected. Instagram and Facebook stay on the "maybe later, once I actually register a business for this" list.