Comment by donnfelker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donnfelker | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy that FB is releasing these tools. I really am, but you know what I want? I want to use the FB app with out it DESTROYING my phone's usability. Anytime FB is installed on any of my devices, the device degrades day after day until the phone is virtually unusable. Next step: Uninstall Facebook. Phone is usable again. I only use Nexus devices with a lot of space on them, so ... it's not like I'm using a cheap burner.

Unfortunately, due to this problem, I've been using the FB mobile website for a very long time. Every 3-6 months I'll re-install the FB Android app in hopes that things are better, only to be let down once again.

Something tells me that all this bit flipping that FB is doing is not making things better, but worse. Sure, it may be better for the FB app, but worse for the device general. This is just my speculation at this point though ...

Agreed.

I think the Facebook engineers have a tendency to fix symptoms rather than causes. A lot of their engineering creations are trying to shrink the binary while they might want to consider revisiting all the dependencies that their application depends on, because that graph (and the size of their apk) is really absurdly large for such an app.

Of course, there's also the fact that such a tool is already partially obsolete because of Jack and Jill.

I've never been comfortable with the FB app phoning home so I too use the mobile website. The thing about it is that the text fields don't work well at all. Slow response times, no way to go back and correct my errors without erasing everything, and repetition of words. Over the years and across browsers the issues change but they've never worked like most other text fields on mobile websites. I wish I knew what they were doing to make them behave so poorly.

I'm guessing it has so much old "legacy" code long before all this new cool inventions like React Native etc. were invented.

I wonder why they cannot start from scratch a new one which has a better architecture and does not slow down your phone.

I've actually got to sit down and debug my Nexus 5. I don't run the FB app but it's degrading in the same kind of way. No real easy cause that I can see. I'm hoping adb can shed some light for me.

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