Until a year ago, Facebook had a good excuse for why its mobile apps for devices like the iPad, iPhone, and Android all sucked: they were being concurrently developed in the reductive HTML5 environment, a technology never meant for anything more than websites, ensuring that the apps never had a chance to be good. Even Michelangelo couldn’t have properly painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling if his toolset had consisted of nail polish. The developers involved in the Facebook apps couldn’t be blamed for the fact that the one thing fans of differing mobile platforms could all agree on was that their respective Facebook app wasn’t good enough. But then last fall everything changed, or at least it seemed as much, when Mark Zuckerberg and company made a big deal out of the fact that they were ditching HTML5 in favor of creating each of their mobile platform apps over from scratch, each in their own most ideal programming language. One little problem: a year and several app update releases later, the Facebook app is still subpar.
The shift initially looked promising: entirely new versions of the Facebook app were released for iOS, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, you name it. The interface of each got night and day better instantly, and it felt less like a mobile web page in an app wrapper (which is what it had been) and instead just a bit more like that of a real app. And basic Facebook desktop features have indeed been added at a trickle, as promised. The ability to share a friend’s pictures, for instance, finally came to mobile earlier this year. But these mobile apps simply aren’t stable. Ask a bunch of iPad users how often their Facebook app unexpectedly crashes on them, and each will give a wildly varying answer. But the fact that the typical answer isn’t “zero” should be setting off all kinds of bells and whistles. Except in instances where an iPad user’s system software is corrupt, which is fairly rare, iPad apps don’t tend to crash at all. The idea that a company with the resources of Facebook wouldn’t be able to produce a stable mobile app is vaguely stunning. So will this end up changing?
With all apologies to those being insulted here, at this point the finger must be pointed at Facebook’s in-house app development team – or its bosses. One has to assume that Zuck has the money to hire the most talented app developers on the planet. Assuming he’s done just that, the lingering instability of the Facebook mobile apps suggests that these developers are cranking out updates in such rapid fashion that they’re not being fully finished and tested before being pushed out to users. Are the developers themselves so eager to do five years of catch-up work in six months that they’re releasing updates that aren’t ready yet? Or are Facebook’s execs so concerned about fixing their original HTML5 mistake that they’re the ones overcompensating by forcing the developers to release updates that are still in the “this would be cool if it didn’t suck” stage? That’s a question that only those within the social network’s ranks know the answer to.
Apple does some basic testing of all App Store apps before they’re greenlit for the iPad and iPhone, a big part of why apps on those devices are so stable. If it were only the Facebook Android app crashing, one could chock it up to the fact that nothing on that side of the fence ever seems to get tested by any of the platform partners involved. But the fact that the Facebook app is still unstable across multiple platforms points the finger back to Zuckerberg and company. At some point perhaps they’ll get the message that instability is not a price most end users are willing to pay in exchange for rapid app development releases. Or perhaps all those years of catchup work will finally be completed, allowing developers to catch their break and find time to go back and look for all the typos in code they’ve made along the way.
*http://www.stableytimes.com/news/why-does-the-facebook-app-still-suck-in-2013/5914/
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