Hacker News Reader

Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

Wait, the Facebook app is bad? I honestly hadn't noticed these nitpicks until I read the article, and even now they don't really bother me. I'm convinced that the only people who can tell and even care about the performance difference between Path and Facebook's native apps are software developers. My wife was using the web version of Facebook's mobile app for months before she discovered she could download the app, and she's never complained about either.

If I'm right and most people don't care, then it's a huge win to mix in HTML when convenient for the same reasons mentioned in the very article this thread is linked to that's lambasting Facebook's app.

View on HN

Actually, I've noticed all of these issues. Especially the notification sync problem. Lots of my friends have too. The Facebook iOS app sucks, big time.

The iOS facebook app has gone from being fast and nice, to a shitty piece of bloat and lag. It's come to the point where I can't be bothered to "click through" on stories, because bringing up the list of comments on a story takes ~30 seconds. Forget about clicking on a friend with timeline enabled: The screen goes into powersave and autolock before the page even starts to render.

"Facebook for iOS"? More like "Loading... for iOS"!

My girlfriend has zero interest in software development and her eyes glaze over when I talk about it, and she can tell the difference. Mostly due to the fact it used to be reasonably decent then went to hell pretty quickly, but she saw the change.

_Every_single_time_ I start the Facebook app and either the notifications or messages icon is red, the list that pop ups when clicking it is outdated. So the progress to just read a single message or notification is,

1. Tap highlighted icon 2. Suppress the instinct to tap the first entry (high failure rate here :)) 3. Pull to refresh 4. Wait for refresh 5. Hit the new first entry

Either this happens to everyone, then it contradicts your point, because not every normal user knows how to pull-to-refresh. Especially since there's no visual indicator for this at all.

Or this bug only affects some users, and then it explains why you are happy. My girlfriend on the original iPad certainly has the same problem.

I just talked to a friend about this. We both stopped using the app because it takes 10 seconds from tapping the app icon to seeing content on our HTC Incredibles. During that time I see 3 differently designed loader circles.

The app UI is great, but I just don't use it because it the payoff is not worth the wait.

Obviously this depends on your phone. Using an html5 app on a 4s vs. a 3gs is a totally different experience, that probably explains the discrepancies between your experiences.

"My wife was using the web version of Facebook's mobile app for months before she discovered she could download the app, and she's never complained about either."

As a counterpoint, my wife often finds the Facebook Mobile app to be incredibly sluggish.

Many users often don't complain about performance, but if you make things work faster they tend to appreciate it anyway.

I have noticed these issues, even on my 4s, but it is not a huge issue.

"I'm convinced that the only people who can tell and even care about the performance difference between Path and Facebook's native apps are software developers...most people don't care"

the story you're commenting on presents evidence which contradicts what you're saying. unless you count a brief introductory paragraph, it is literally the first point they make.

the article says that the app has nearly 12K one-star reviews and an average of 2 stars, indicating that people don't like the app. the writing is not 100% clear, but it appears to be saying that the app only has a little over 21K reviews total, which means more than half of all reviews for the app are one-star reviews.

how could you possibly square this information with your belief that most people don't care? they counted the number of people who care and not only are there thousands of them, but more than 50% of the reviews are as negative as it is possible for a review to be.

seriously, dude, "people hate it" is the first point this article makes, and it does so with plenty of compelling evidence.

The 21k reviews is for "this version" -- there's actually nearly 2 million reviews for "all versions" with an average of 4 stars.

The Android app has 3.2 million reviews (averaging 3.6 stars - 600,000 or so are 1 star).

So it doesn't seem as bad when you consider "all versions" instead of just "this version". I wonder if it's a matter of more tech-savvy people reviewing the newer versions when they come out? Or it could just be that the app really is getting much, much worse with every release...

The app used to be all native objective-c. It was actually pretty good. They made a switch to make their different platforms share more code and be more consistent with each other and quality took a HUGE nosedive.

Ah I see, that would explain it.

Personally, I'm waiting for them to fix contact sync on Android ICS. That's the only reason I have the app installed...

They stated they would never do that though. Because that will allow you to export emails from Facebook to Gmail. Facebook said they are protecting you by not letting you export them to Google. Never mind the fact you can do that to Yahoo with the click of a button.

The sync worked before because Google allowed them to use a special API to allow them to show contacts on your phone without actually syncing them to your account (removing the Facebook app removed the contacts)

yep same user interface and same code across platforms means suboptimal app for each of the distinct platforms

Well that's including the three20 version, which would support the author's point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com