A Faster Facebook for iOS

Facebook made the mistake of optimizing for their developers' sense of efficiency -- at the cost of user experience -- rather than optimizing for their users' experience.<p>Given the resources available to them, switching to UIWebView was a ridiculous trade-off. I'm glad to see they rectified this decision.<p>The lesson to be learned is this: at the end of the day, it's the product and user experience that matters. If you sacrifice product quality for some notion of engineering perfectionism -- whatever it might be -- you're not doing your job as a professional engineer.

Just updated - it's quite noticeably faster, and feels much more native than their previous shortcut of lots of UIWebViews. I commend the Facebook iOS team! This app has regained its throne as the model of iOS UX.<p>Let this be a lesson to us all: when putting user experience as the first priority, the nirvana of writing your UI once in HTML and having it work universally still isn't there.

It has constantly amazed me that Facebook's mobile app experiences are so, so poor.<p>At the same time, having watched my friends swear at Facebook on their smartphones and yet <i>continue to use the app</i>, day-in, day-out, maybe Facebook are more clever than I give them credit for; I haven't seen people move elsewhere because of the problems.

Here's to the hope that an android counterpart is not far behind.

The "photos-overflow-outside-the-white-card-theyre-on" effect has always bugged me. It looks like a rendering defect or something. I get that they're trying to maximize screen real estate, but I think it just looks terrible.

It's an extraordinary improvement. Does anyone know if it was written in native Objective-C or if this is a very optimized HTML5 version (or hybrid, like the LinkedIn app)

Yes, the app is faster. Engineering backpedaled and rewrote the app to become fully native again. Speed should be a top requirement for mobile apps <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424212" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424212</a>

Has anyone there found info about what libraries Facebook has embedded into this app? For example, if you go to Privacy and Legal in the Camera • app, you get a nice list of every open-source project they embed. I can't find it in this new FB app...

No love for Android users? :(

Google's cached version: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://newsroom.fb.com/News/A-Faster-Facebook-for-iOS-1b4.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a><p>(down at time of writing)

Congrats to the team at Facebook, overdue, but it's a massive improvement.

Used it, it truly is miles better. They can now finally say they're serious about mobile with a straight face.

I vaguely remember when Facebook previously had a nice native iOS app long ago and their main or only iOS dev ranted about the App store and refused to do any more iOS development.<p>Some time after a terrible webapp was released. Not quite sure why someone else there couldn't take over maintenance of it.

Facebook app lost 100% of their iOS dev team when joe hewitt stopped developing for them. They decided to let interns in charge of native libraries like Three20 (which has become a mess since then) and let web people in charge. It took them to hire someone from Apple to get their things together and do something valid on that platform. What's crazy is that nobody around them was able to tell them that mobile constraints makes it a entirely different think than the web. You just need to code one "hello world" with one button using phonegap to realize that uiwebview isn't anywhere close to native sdk. On the other side,the fact that Apple decided not to update UIWebView to nitro was probably a big matter for them...

Did they added monetization strategies into this app (ads, sponsored stories, etc)? I'm not an iOS user, but after their harsh stock decline I would've expected to see aggressive monetization on the mobile app/web.

Just tried, very good! A big step forward. I hope they'll go the extra mile and release a full featured desktop client as well, starting with osx possibly.

Why the hell did this take so long. I really don't understand. Surely facebook understands the importance of mobile. Glad they finally did it though..

Not sure why these companies release there apps for iOS first when Android has the market share. It makes absolutely no business sense.

I tried the new app on the iPad 1 and personally I still prefer the web page - it still feels smoother for scrolling. Another thing I don't like in the app is the chat list on the right that is always visible even if I'm offline. Is it better on the newer iPads?

It seems strange that they'd use a font size of 11px on that page.

This is a fascinating read. I love the level of detail, talking about solutions to performance problems like caching the heights of rendered strings.

Facebook gives me a feeling quite like the one I feel I would have observing off-white eggshell paint dry or maybe munching on a packing peanut.

There are still a few issues<p>[1] The application doesn't work well in landscape mode<p>[2] No feature to edit comments, this was existing as a feature in the previous app.

It's about time. I'm surprised that their terrible mobile app hasn't hurt them in marketshare more.

Is it me, or is line spacing on the iPad <i>really</i> tight?

Why start with iOS and not Android? Seriously!?

Finally! Huge improvement.

Android users waiting...

Bye Bye HTML5!

about bloody time!

A faster, more terminal cancer. Oh happy day.