x.com/EOEboh/status/2054507192292872599

The phrase "every major app" is a universal claim, so a single well-documented counterexample is enough to disprove it.

Meta has repeatedly published technical documentation showing that Facebook's photo infrastructure does not use Amazon S3 as its backing store:

• In Meta's engineering post "Needle in a haystack: efficient storage of billions of photos", the company says its photo server "stores photos in a generic object store called Haystack."
• In a later Meta engineering post, "An analysis of Facebook photo caching," the company states: "Facebook stores these photos on Haystack machines that are optimized to store photos."

Because Facebook/Meta is plainly a major app, this contradicts the post's claim that every major app stores images in S3. The post may be gesturing at a common architectural pattern (object storage rather than storing binaries directly in a relational database), but as written its wording is too absolute and is factually incorrect.

So the specific problem is not the general idea that many apps avoid storing images directly in a database; it's the categorical claim that all major apps use S3. Meta's public infrastructure writeups show that is not true.