12 ms·

A Faster Facebook for iOS

273 points by adamjernst 14y ago

thomseddon 14y ago
Google's cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://newsroom.fb.com/News/A-Faster-Facebook-for-iOS-1b4.aspx http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... (down at time of writing)
destraynor 14y ago
Congrats to the team at Facebook, overdue, but it's a massive improvement.
mootothemax 14y ago
It has constantly amazed me that Facebook's mobile app experiences are so, so poor. At the same time, having watched my friends swear at Facebook on their smartphones and yet continue to use the app, 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.
- state 14y ago
  Is there somewhere else for them to go?
  - brink 14y ago
    Google+?
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      This would be extremely useful if I wanted to hear all about the lives of my friends who work for Google, and only said people.
    - tlear 14y ago
      Atleast on release G+ on iOS was an abomination that made FB look amazing
- seiji 14y ago
  Inelastic demand lets you screw users in all kinds of creative ways. Also see: craigslist, crappy dating sites, and news.yc.
  - powrtoch 14y ago
    What are the creative ways in which HN screws us?
    - mdanger 14y ago
      I think the parent is making a comment about the news.yc iOS app, not HN itself?
    - ceejayoz 14y ago
      It's not very "creative", but the site is pretty awful on an iPhone. You have to zoom in an order of magnitude to be able to click up/downvote, and the layout doesn't shrink to fit the smaller screen at all.
    - shalmanese 14y ago
      "Unknown or expired link"
  - dreamdu5t 14y ago
    Facebook has no demand, it's free. There's no way to establish supply/demand without a price.
    - seiji 14y ago
      The cost of this demand type is attention. People will keep paying attention because they are invested personally (or they believe other people are invested personally and they want access to the peoplemarket). You can measure the elasticity by adding anything detracting from user experience (i.e. wasting your user's time when you could automate solutions (e.g. cragislist spam apartment listings you spend 20 hours sorting through manually) or speed up your site (e.g. social website slowness/downtime/high variance in page load times)). You've found some elastic jumps when users start leaving because you're wasting more and more of their time. People only have so many minutes of focusable attention every day. It's precious and irreplaceable. Don't waste your user's limiting waking attention with errors, manual aggregations, confusions, slowness, or "oops this failed try again and it may work or it may not work and you'll have to try again and it still won't work."
- jmduke 14y ago
  I don't use Facebook because it's got a superior UX, I use it because it's the only site where I can videochat with my girlfriend, catch up with my middle school math teacher, and view pictures of my grandparents' anniversary at the same time.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Facebook doesn't want to optimize the mobile experience. They make far less money from mobile users. Their ideal world would be that people can get their immediate fix on their phone, but for most interactions, they head to their desktop. They are getting dragged into a better UX. They aren't pushing for it.
flatline3 14y ago
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. Given the resources available to them, switching to UIWebView was a ridiculous trade-off. I'm glad to see they rectified this decision. 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.
- dclusin 14y ago
  Another problem as well is people do not update their apps, which I suspect occupied quite a bit of discussion. I could see this becoming quite the headache when operating at the scale of facebook.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - why-el 14y ago
    I wonder if the mobile space (asking out of complete ignorance) has an example similar to Chrome's automatic updates. But I guess given the amount of bandwidth that goes into regularly updating mobile apps, I am not sure people will opt for it.
    - CodeCube 14y ago
      You can mark an app to auto-update on the google play store for Android. It's opt-in by the consumer
    - jsnell 14y ago
      Android is now supposed to do updates with binary deltas rather than full reloads, which should help a lot with the bandwidth issue.
  - hdoan741 14y ago
    Facebook may put announcement (or that sort) in their app to let people know that they should upgrade.
noamsml 14y ago
Here's to the hope that an android counterpart is not far behind.
- avolcano 14y ago
  I've found the Facebook app on my GNex is faster than it was on my iPhone 4, but that might be chalked up to phone speed differences rather than the Android app actually being better.
  - ConstantineXVI 14y ago
    Android WebViews still get to use full-on V8 (where the equivalent Nitro on iOS is limited outside Safari); which likely helps web-based apps on Android. Despite that, the Android FB app, and most other WebView-based apps on both platforms, tend (IMHO) to be rather dog-slow and buggy anyway. The App Store in iOS6 is one as well, and it shows.
christiangenco 14y ago
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. 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.
- lchang 14y ago
  > the model of iOS UX. Are you sure? It's better, yes, but it's not a model of UX and on an iPad it seems not much thought was taken into making it a truly universal app. There's a lot of unused space and everything is too large. The Google+ app with its combo of Path and Flipboard is a much better model to follow. Fast, and it takes advantage of the screen size in both versions.
- 0x0 14y ago
  I think it still feels like a UIWebView but with a boosted scrolling acceleration factor to make the old stuff feel faster. Some pages do load slightly quicker though, so good job on that. :)
- conradev 14y ago
  > This app has regained its throne as the model of iOS UX. I wouldn't go this far. Sure, the CoreData backend and table view controller implementation is beautiful and awesome. However, the root level navigation could be improved. The pseudo-popovers for messages, notifications, and friend requests is inconsistent with the rest of iOS, even though it might be consistent with past versions of the application and the versions of Facebook on other platforms.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  > 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. And it will never be. HTML just sucks for application development. Why on earth exchange the benefits of using the hardware resources properly for the mess that HTML+CSS+JavaScript is? To mess the customer's experience? Don't be afraid of touching C, C++ or any other language with native code compilers and at most rewrite the UI part. Or shell out some money for tools like Mono or similar. Although I am forced to code Web applications at work, I am a firm believer that web should only be used for communication protocols and documents as such.
tsurantino 14y ago
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)
- adamjernst 14y ago
  Objective-C. Check out the engineering blog post here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-rebuilding-facebook-for-ios/10151036091753920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...
- jarito 14y ago
  It's Objective-C with some fallback rendering for HTML5 stuff (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-rebuilding-facebook-for-ios/10151036091753920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...)
chrisdroukas 14y ago
Is it me, or is line spacing on the iPad really tight?
brittohalloran 14y ago
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.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  I remember showing a coworker when that change came out. "Hey, look, the new FB app is pretty buggy."
- recursive 14y ago
  That's intentional?!? I thought I just had a non-standard resolution or something. It really looks like crap.
  - brittohalloran 14y ago
    Yeah I know, I thought so too. Look at the picture in their official blog post though, they're showing it off like they're proud of it. http://newsroom.fb.com/ImageLibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=2872 http://newsroom.fb.com/ImageLibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetails...
    - evgen 14y ago
      Try attaching multiple photos to a post and you will see why the photos overflow (plus what has also been mentioned re: emphasis on photos)
- mbell 14y ago
  The worst part is the way it chooses to resize/stretch images. Some are just ugly for example ecards are all screwed up. Others could seriously piss some people off. Quicky scrolling through my feed I saw two imagines that were originally of a female friend standing somewhere, taken in portrait orientation. On the new feed they appear as zoomed in "body shots" with the head and below the knees cut off.
dude_abides 14y ago
No love for Android users? :(
- marknutter 14y ago
  And therein lies the rub. Native development comes with its drawbacks too.
esilverberg2 14y ago
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...
- Xuzz 14y ago
  It's still there, just less obviously accessible: Settings app -> Facebook -> About.
jpxxx 14y ago
Used it, it truly is miles better. They can now finally say they're serious about mobile with a straight face.
playhard 14y ago
Finally! Huge improvement.
DonnyV 14y ago
Not sure why these companies release there apps for iOS first when Android has the market share. It makes absolutely no business sense.
- sazpaz 14y ago
  Despite more uniques coming from Android, maybe iOS user show more engagement.
  - goatforce5 14y ago
    I believe that's what the statistics say. eg, something from a Google search just now: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=iOS,Android&sample=29 http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....
- zeroonetwothree 14y ago
  Possibly because most of the employees use iOS...
- billeh 14y ago
  Much easier to optimize for three very similar phones versus hundreds (thousands?) of Android phones?
- wallflower 14y ago
  Even though Facebook for Android may have higher monthly active users, the iOS user base from a marketing perspective is a more attractive demographic to target nascent mobile revenue opportunities at. Soccer moms almost exclusively use iPhones.
- shadesandcolour 14y ago
  This again? Really? The main improvement in this version is that it was rewritten for iOS, it didn't need to be rewritten for Android. Whether or not you have more marketshare doesn't mean you need an update for a platform you're not on.
sazpaz 14y ago
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.
- itsprofitbaron 14y ago
  Facebook are making currently making $183M a year off mobile & they haven't rolled them out worldwide yet either. They were appearing for me in the old iOS app & are only be shown every 150 or so (at the moment in the tests they are performing) which has been confirmed by Facebook's CFO David Ebersman who said Facebook are "being very careful about the volume of sponsored stories in the news feed because it’s so core to the user experience."
vladoh 14y ago
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?
tnorthcutt 14y ago
It seems strange that they'd use a font size of 11px on that page.
- davidradcliffe 14y ago
  It seems strange that they'd use .NET/aspx on that site.
antirez 14y ago
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.
- eyko 14y ago
  The desktop client is their website.
sidcool 14y ago
Android users waiting...
jbverschoor 14y ago
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..
logn 14y ago
It's about time. I'm surprised that their terrible mobile app hasn't hurt them in marketshare more.
- jbverschoor 14y ago
  Indeed... that was (and still is) a huge threat to facebook. Performance doesn't mean this is the best way for MSNS
- murki 14y ago
  Well if something, it would make you fall back to check Facebook on its full browser version, forcing you to see ads, which would be a good move for them.
Craiggybear 14y ago
They seem really desperate to utterly reinvent everything about themselves lately. Hmmmm. Wonder why?
SG- 14y ago
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. Some time after a terrible webapp was released. Not quite sure why someone else there couldn't take over maintenance of it.
alexjarvis 14y ago
about bloody time!
Baba_Chaghaloo 14y ago
A faster, more terminal cancer. Oh happy day.
dirkdk 14y ago
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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424212 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424212
nicolasmiller 14y ago
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.
bsaul 14y ago
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...
dreamdu5t 14y ago
Why start with iOS and not Android? Seriously!?
- programminggeek 14y ago
  Probably because the users expect better on iOS. They certainly complained louder. Also, my guess is the iOS user base might be higher value - as in they click on more ads and the iOS app brings in more money. If the iOS app is more responsive, users tap on more ads, and Facebook makes more money.
nathan_f77 14y ago
This is a fascinating read. I love the level of detail, talking about solutions to performance problems like caching the heights of rendered strings.
anuraj 14y ago
Bye Bye HTML5!
denzil_correa 14y ago
There are still a few issues [1] The application doesn't work well in landscape mode [2] No feature to edit comments, this was existing as a feature in the previous app.

273 points by adamjernst 14y ago

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

destraynor 14y ago

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

mootothemax 14y ago

It has constantly amazed me that Facebook's mobile app experiences are so, so poor. At the same time, having watched my friends swear at Facebook on their smartphones and yet continue to use the app, 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.

state 14y ago
Is there somewhere else for them to go?
- brink 14y ago
  Google+?
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    This would be extremely useful if I wanted to hear all about the lives of my friends who work for Google, and only said people.
  - tlear 14y ago
    Atleast on release G+ on iOS was an abomination that made FB look amazing
seiji 14y ago
Inelastic demand lets you screw users in all kinds of creative ways. Also see: craigslist, crappy dating sites, and news.yc.
- powrtoch 14y ago
  What are the creative ways in which HN screws us?
  - mdanger 14y ago
    I think the parent is making a comment about the news.yc iOS app, not HN itself?
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    It's not very "creative", but the site is pretty awful on an iPhone. You have to zoom in an order of magnitude to be able to click up/downvote, and the layout doesn't shrink to fit the smaller screen at all.
  - shalmanese 14y ago
    "Unknown or expired link"
- dreamdu5t 14y ago
  Facebook has no demand, it's free. There's no way to establish supply/demand without a price.
  - seiji 14y ago
    The cost of this demand type is attention. People will keep paying attention because they are invested personally (or they believe other people are invested personally and they want access to the peoplemarket). You can measure the elasticity by adding anything detracting from user experience (i.e. wasting your user's time when you could automate solutions (e.g. cragislist spam apartment listings you spend 20 hours sorting through manually) or speed up your site (e.g. social website slowness/downtime/high variance in page load times)). You've found some elastic jumps when users start leaving because you're wasting more and more of their time. People only have so many minutes of focusable attention every day. It's precious and irreplaceable. Don't waste your user's limiting waking attention with errors, manual aggregations, confusions, slowness, or "oops this failed try again and it may work or it may not work and you'll have to try again and it still won't work."
jmduke 14y ago
I don't use Facebook because it's got a superior UX, I use it because it's the only site where I can videochat with my girlfriend, catch up with my middle school math teacher, and view pictures of my grandparents' anniversary at the same time.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Facebook doesn't want to optimize the mobile experience. They make far less money from mobile users. Their ideal world would be that people can get their immediate fix on their phone, but for most interactions, they head to their desktop. They are getting dragged into a better UX. They aren't pushing for it.

flatline3 14y ago

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. Given the resources available to them, switching to UIWebView was a ridiculous trade-off. I'm glad to see they rectified this decision. 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.

dclusin 14y ago
Another problem as well is people do not update their apps, which I suspect occupied quite a bit of discussion. I could see this becoming quite the headache when operating at the scale of facebook.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- why-el 14y ago
  I wonder if the mobile space (asking out of complete ignorance) has an example similar to Chrome's automatic updates. But I guess given the amount of bandwidth that goes into regularly updating mobile apps, I am not sure people will opt for it.
  - CodeCube 14y ago
    You can mark an app to auto-update on the google play store for Android. It's opt-in by the consumer
  - jsnell 14y ago
    Android is now supposed to do updates with binary deltas rather than full reloads, which should help a lot with the bandwidth issue.
- hdoan741 14y ago
  Facebook may put announcement (or that sort) in their app to let people know that they should upgrade.

noamsml 14y ago

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

avolcano 14y ago
I've found the Facebook app on my GNex is faster than it was on my iPhone 4, but that might be chalked up to phone speed differences rather than the Android app actually being better.
- ConstantineXVI 14y ago
  Android WebViews still get to use full-on V8 (where the equivalent Nitro on iOS is limited outside Safari); which likely helps web-based apps on Android. Despite that, the Android FB app, and most other WebView-based apps on both platforms, tend (IMHO) to be rather dog-slow and buggy anyway. The App Store in iOS6 is one as well, and it shows.

christiangenco 14y ago

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. 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.

lchang 14y ago
> the model of iOS UX. Are you sure? It's better, yes, but it's not a model of UX and on an iPad it seems not much thought was taken into making it a truly universal app. There's a lot of unused space and everything is too large. The Google+ app with its combo of Path and Flipboard is a much better model to follow. Fast, and it takes advantage of the screen size in both versions.
0x0 14y ago
I think it still feels like a UIWebView but with a boosted scrolling acceleration factor to make the old stuff feel faster. Some pages do load slightly quicker though, so good job on that. :)
conradev 14y ago
> This app has regained its throne as the model of iOS UX. I wouldn't go this far. Sure, the CoreData backend and table view controller implementation is beautiful and awesome. However, the root level navigation could be improved. The pseudo-popovers for messages, notifications, and friend requests is inconsistent with the rest of iOS, even though it might be consistent with past versions of the application and the versions of Facebook on other platforms.
pjmlp 14y ago
> 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. And it will never be. HTML just sucks for application development. Why on earth exchange the benefits of using the hardware resources properly for the mess that HTML+CSS+JavaScript is? To mess the customer's experience? Don't be afraid of touching C, C++ or any other language with native code compilers and at most rewrite the UI part. Or shell out some money for tools like Mono or similar. Although I am forced to code Web applications at work, I am a firm believer that web should only be used for communication protocols and documents as such.

tsurantino 14y ago

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)

adamjernst 14y ago
Objective-C. Check out the engineering blog post here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-rebuilding-facebook-for-ios/10151036091753920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...
jarito 14y ago
It's Objective-C with some fallback rendering for HTML5 stuff (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-rebuilding-facebook-for-ios/10151036091753920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...)

chrisdroukas 14y ago

Is it me, or is line spacing on the iPad really tight?

brittohalloran 14y ago

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.

ceejayoz 14y ago
I remember showing a coworker when that change came out. "Hey, look, the new FB app is pretty buggy."
recursive 14y ago
That's intentional?!? I thought I just had a non-standard resolution or something. It really looks like crap.
- brittohalloran 14y ago
  Yeah I know, I thought so too. Look at the picture in their official blog post though, they're showing it off like they're proud of it. http://newsroom.fb.com/ImageLibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=2872 http://newsroom.fb.com/ImageLibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetails...
  - evgen 14y ago
    Try attaching multiple photos to a post and you will see why the photos overflow (plus what has also been mentioned re: emphasis on photos)
mbell 14y ago
The worst part is the way it chooses to resize/stretch images. Some are just ugly for example ecards are all screwed up. Others could seriously piss some people off. Quicky scrolling through my feed I saw two imagines that were originally of a female friend standing somewhere, taken in portrait orientation. On the new feed they appear as zoomed in "body shots" with the head and below the knees cut off.

dude_abides 14y ago

No love for Android users? :(

marknutter 14y ago
And therein lies the rub. Native development comes with its drawbacks too.

esilverberg2 14y ago

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...

Xuzz 14y ago
It's still there, just less obviously accessible: Settings app -> Facebook -> About.

jpxxx 14y ago

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

playhard 14y ago

Finally! Huge improvement.

DonnyV 14y ago

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

sazpaz 14y ago
Despite more uniques coming from Android, maybe iOS user show more engagement.
- goatforce5 14y ago
  I believe that's what the statistics say. eg, something from a Google search just now: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=iOS,Android&sample=29 http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....
zeroonetwothree 14y ago
Possibly because most of the employees use iOS...
billeh 14y ago
Much easier to optimize for three very similar phones versus hundreds (thousands?) of Android phones?
wallflower 14y ago
Even though Facebook for Android may have higher monthly active users, the iOS user base from a marketing perspective is a more attractive demographic to target nascent mobile revenue opportunities at. Soccer moms almost exclusively use iPhones.
shadesandcolour 14y ago
This again? Really? The main improvement in this version is that it was rewritten for iOS, it didn't need to be rewritten for Android. Whether or not you have more marketshare doesn't mean you need an update for a platform you're not on.

sazpaz 14y ago

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.

itsprofitbaron 14y ago
Facebook are making currently making $183M a year off mobile & they haven't rolled them out worldwide yet either. They were appearing for me in the old iOS app & are only be shown every 150 or so (at the moment in the tests they are performing) which has been confirmed by Facebook's CFO David Ebersman who said Facebook are "being very careful about the volume of sponsored stories in the news feed because it’s so core to the user experience."

vladoh 14y ago

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?

tnorthcutt 14y ago

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

davidradcliffe 14y ago
It seems strange that they'd use .NET/aspx on that site.

antirez 14y ago

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.

eyko 14y ago
The desktop client is their website.

sidcool 14y ago

Android users waiting...

jbverschoor 14y ago

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..

logn 14y ago

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

jbverschoor 14y ago
Indeed... that was (and still is) a huge threat to facebook. Performance doesn't mean this is the best way for MSNS
murki 14y ago
Well if something, it would make you fall back to check Facebook on its full browser version, forcing you to see ads, which would be a good move for them.

Craiggybear 14y ago

They seem really desperate to utterly reinvent everything about themselves lately. Hmmmm. Wonder why?

SG- 14y ago

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. Some time after a terrible webapp was released. Not quite sure why someone else there couldn't take over maintenance of it.

alexjarvis 14y ago

about bloody time!

Baba_Chaghaloo 14y ago

A faster, more terminal cancer. Oh happy day.

dirkdk 14y ago

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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424212 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424212

nicolasmiller 14y ago

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.

bsaul 14y ago

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...

dreamdu5t 14y ago

Why start with iOS and not Android? Seriously!?

programminggeek 14y ago
Probably because the users expect better on iOS. They certainly complained louder. Also, my guess is the iOS user base might be higher value - as in they click on more ads and the iOS app brings in more money. If the iOS app is more responsive, users tap on more ads, and Facebook makes more money.

nathan_f77 14y ago

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

anuraj 14y ago

Bye Bye HTML5!

denzil_correa 14y ago

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