Hey - I'm a director of product at Facebook. The "main reason...the app is being launched more than 18 months after the iPad was first launched" is because we

Hey - I'm a director of product at Facebook. The "main reason...the app is being launched more than 18 months after the iPad was first launched" is because we have a lot of things to do and few engineers to do them. We've got about one engineer per million Facebook users, and as Hacker News demonstrates time and again, those users have a lot of items on their wishlist. For instance, the bugginess and instability of our iPhone app has been a top user complaint for a long time. Turns out the set of skills required to improve an iPhone app is the same as required to build an iPad app. Something's gotta give. As for the "main reason why Facebook wanted users to use the browser instead of a native app," I've never heard that preference expressed at Facebook. Like the rest of you, we use iPads. And like the rest of you, we'd prefer a fast, sexy, native, custom-made experience to a website designed for your desktop monitor. Occam's razor, pure and simple. For a community that prides itself on rational debate, I'm consistently surprised at the level of discourse on certain issues here.