Dear Facebook: Please learn how to design Android apps that don't suck | Hacker News Reader

Dear Facebook: Please learn how to design Android apps that don't suck

blogs.computerworld.com

69 pointsmariuz48 comments

Regardless of how good it is, I don't feel comfortable installing it because of the permissions it requires. You don't lose much by visiting fb.com in a browser.

Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera. This permission allows the app to use the camera at any time without your confirmation.

Allows the app to read data about your contacts stored on your phone, including the frequency with which you've called, emailed, or communicated in other ways with specific individuals. This permission allows apps to save your contact data, and malicious apps may share contact data without your knowledge.

Allows the app to modify the data about your contacts stored on your phone, including the frequency with which you've called, emailed, or communicated in other ways with specific contacts. This permission allows apps to delete contact data.

Allows the app to access the phone features of the device. This permission allows the app to determine the phone number and device IDs, whether a call is active, and the remote number connected by a call.

But is it possible to allow app to take pictures (when you want), import contacts (if you want), sync contacts (again, optional) etc without those permissions?

I'm not an android developer, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but usually those permissions sound like you're giving up all your data but in reality it's just used to do something simple as to prevent vibration/ringing/notifications while you're talking on the phone.

It is not possible. This is a serious flaw in Android's permissions model IMO. Everything must be asked for up-front in the app's manifest. You cannot ask for more permissions at run time.

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/permissio...

absolutely! I just visit fb with the browser! no problems there and works pretty good! And if you realllly need a icon, you can always add one to your homescreen, nothing like a web shortcult (already availbale with the built in browser and i think firefox will add it soon)! Done!

Android is in serious need of better user control over app permissions.

Apps should have their permissions in two groups:

* Must-have: the app will not work without these (e.g. camera access for a picture-taking app)

* Optional: some features of the app will not work (e.g. camera access for Facebook)

Despite how bad the Facebook app is, I find it to be much better than opening the website on a mobile browser, but I wish I, as the user, could specify what permissions to grant the app.

The one thing you do lose is push notifications, although I suppose I could turn on SMS notifs.

Facebooks engineering seems to have weird priorities. They seem put all their effort into crazy stuff like "Graph Search" whilst ignoring incredibly annoying issues like not having a basic search engine to find your own posts or having two week old posts showing up in the stream approximately 20% of the time. I'm guessing it is a lack of self discipline. Everyone wants to solve the sexy problems but no-one works on debugging the old year race condition that has been bugging everyone.

Don't forget that they need to invent a new way to shove "find new friends" down my throat, every second week.

I've been "using" the Android Facebook app for over a year, maybe two and it seems to have gotten worse over time, at least in the past year. The "new" version doesn't seem to be any better.

I was at talk trying to check for a message using the app with limited success yesterday, before I finally gave up and used the Android RealVNC app to remote connect to one of my home systems, open a web browser, and connect to Facebook that way.

I'm really unsure what the issue is here. Is it just really hard to make a decent app? Is Facebook not devoting enough resources to development? Is the development team really bad? Do they not know how terrible their app is? Are developers of the needed caliber in too short supply?

> I've been "using" the Android Facebook app for over a year, maybe two and it's actually gotten worse over time

That sort of seems to be the "Facebook way" with everything, and has been as long as I can remember (since the college-only days)...

It's like they know they have to keep changing and evolving to stay relevant, but they have the faintest clue how, and so barrel ahead blindly at full-steam, constantly praying that nothing goes too wrong...

like a startup(!)

Err, why use VNC instead of just using a local browser in desktop mode?

Mostly because the icon was on the same screen, and I'm already logged in on my home system, and I didn't want to type my email / password in again.

Maybe I should do that in the future.

I find the mobile website version is pretty good on android.

Me too, and HaxSync does a very good job at synchronising my Facebook contacts, calendar, etc.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mots.haxsy...

I've been using it for about 2 or 3 years - basically since it's first release. And I actually think the latest app is the best they've done yet. Which isn't really saying much given the latest app still sucks badly.

But around 2 years ago, it was so bad I was running 3rd party Facebook clients on Android - some of which were littered with adverts.

When being subjected to numerous intrusive adverts is less annoying than using the ad-free official app - well, then you know the in house developers clearly need a lesson in mobile development.

I think they're stuck in the desktop mindset.

Moving to mobile would require a shift in thinking that might be impossible for such a large and entrenched organization.

The teenagers of today, having grown up with smartphones, will likely exit en masse when a usable alternative emerges.

To be fair, as an Android user, whenever I use Google's apps on iOS I think "Dear Google, please learn how to design Android apps that don't suck."

I stopped using the FB app since it was so slow it was painful . It was much faster using FB trough the browser. Then FB released the new FB app in December and I installed it again. It was super, it only took a second or so to display the news feed when you launched it.

But about two weeks ago everything went down hill. Sometimes it took up to a minute to actually display anything and most of the time at least 20 seconds (all over wi-fi). So I uninstalled it again.

What baffles me is that they don't notice this or that they just don't care.

They literally have had to force staff to carry android devices to experience it first hand.

They have been shoving dog food down their employees mouths because they are aware of how bad it is.

are android devices really that unpopular there? even amongst the people coding the android app?

http://phandroid.com/2012/11/27/facebook-employees-android/

It's like that in most of the Valley. You have (a) early adopters who jumped on the iPhone train in 2007 and can't get off due to lock-in (apps, familiarity), (b) high percentage of Mac users creating a halo effect, and (c) hero-worship of Steve Jobs/Apple. This combines to make the percentage of Android users in the Valley much lower than in the general population.

huh. I never noticed that having android was so rare amongst techies in the valley.

Facebook is the most popular example of a bad app, but it's far from the only one...

Try the Grindr app sometime. It'll kill your battery life like nothing else, and it has some sort of blocking bug that interrupts music when it is refreshing your location. --I haven't encountered any other app that does that!

Facebook's mobile apps have to use the Facebook API, which is notoriously terrible. Facebook have no reason to devote resources to this, as they don't want third party implementations dragging people away from their ad revenue.

Similarly, their mobile app is capable of delivering far less ads than the web page, so they'd rather people sat on that at their desk rather than browsing on their phone.

In relation to lack of decent search and other obviously lacking elements: They're always going to devote far more resources to things which directly or indirectly improve advertising (graph search, friend finding, increasing numbers of likes) rather than things that enhance user experience (since user experience is far more tied to network size rather than feature set, compared to other markets)

Good points. The mobile web page works better in some situations. Especially if the network is bad. Works better with Chrome for android, but also with the stock browser on 2.x phones.

> Similarly, their mobile app is capable of delivering far less ads than the web page, so they'd rather people sat on that at their desk rather than browsing on their phone.

So basically their strategy for accelerating mobile usage is "don't support mobile"?

The amazing thing is how much memory the app can take up. Forget the UX issues, it is urgent to fix the outrageous memory usage first. For example, my old phone had just about 100M available for user apps.

Facebook uses about 121M. That's even after disabling all notifications and clearing data. 121M is more than all the rest of my apps combined.

Google+ is also a relative heavyweight at 31M. Android's most used app, Google Maps, uses a svelte 8.9M.

On older phones, just running Facebook alone will make the entire OS experience slow and frustrating. Now with the latest update, it prompts me to sync my contacts every open. It is shocking how badly they have managed this.

The Skype and Netflix apps are also awful custom homebrewed garbage. Netflix constantly freezes and becomes unresponsive, and Skype doesn't background itself anymore since the recent "Windows 8" overhaul on it. Also, why does Netflix try to download every poster for every movie ever as soon as I open it? I only have 300 KB/s internet, that takes forever!

First thing they need to do is to allow the app to be installed to the SD card. The bloatware is now over 25mb in size, and I have a very limited size internal memory on my phone, whereas have a bucket load of space on my SD.

And while we're on the subject, YouTube, GMaps and TweekDeck all need to allow the same thing (every app should). I don't care about the lose of widgets since I never use them. I forced them to SD using Titanium backup, but it's not perfect and there are some glitches.

It's pretty bloated and slow, no point using it! i dont need a 40+megs app running all the time with full permissions on the background, makes no sense! the facebook messenger is the same thing! and thats besides the need to "access all my contacts", NO i want facebook contacts on facebook and phone contacts on the phone for all the obvious reasons!

I hate those buttons in the top-left corner of the screen that are used for the main navigation. If you use two hands they are ok, but you know there are people that still use phones only with one hand. There is no better place for the main navigation that the top-left corner? Could any recommend a better alternative? What about bottom-left?

I suppose the devs all have the latest 10" phones... ><

I actually don't think the new version of their app is that bad. Granted I might not be a heavy user of the app, maybe 10 minutes/day, but the feed seems a lot faster than it used to, and I like the ability to swipe through peoples image galleries from the stream, without leaving that view.

The Facebook client is getting better, don't forget how bad it was 2 years ago. I even created my own client for that reason. (Shameless plug: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster)

I removed the Facebook app from my iPhone when I heard about the Facebook email scandal in the iOS 6 beta. I realized that they will just keep doing this sort of thing so having their app on my phone was basically like having a latent iPhone virus.

I think it's good. It's a bit laggy compared to the iPhone version but otherwise it provides the functionality I need in a good way.

the most annoying thing in my opinion is, that fb doesn't clear my notifications if I already seen those in another version e.g. website, tablet. It's frustrating to see all these notifications over and over again.

The iPhone version does. The worst offender in this regard is Twitter. I get notifications of direct messages and mentions on (1) the website, (2) the official app on my iPhone and (3) the official app on my iPad.

Why would I need a facebook app?

It's a web page and I have a browser....

Ill bite.

An app can provide notifications, integration and speed. An app can do a lot more caching than the app, and will never have to reload a version of its own code. There's places were apps are appropriate, and this is one of them.

I understand some folks like to recieve fb message notifications as if they were email I guess. Don't feel the need myself.

I guess I'm just questioning the need for an app for all things, when many of the things are just as well served by a decent page in a browser.

The previous post gave more reasons that 'notifications'. Read it more carefully - the important one is 'integration' which covers a host of possible behaviour.

One example - uploading photos straight from the camera. This is a html5 api but the browser support is appalling: http://caniuse.com/stream

More examples - integration with contacts? (i.e. appearing as an option next to call/text etc). Registering under the 'share' menu in Android? Registering as an Intent where appropriate? Ability to run background tasks?

I don't know if Facebook uses these but there's certainly good reasons for an service with it's wide spread of potential functionality to do so.

Those are good reasons for some people, sure. I guess I still see FB as 'just a page' rather than an full, integrated comms service.

I really don't want it as a full integrated comms service!

Facebook is currently the best IM platform in terms of functionality, stability and ubiquity. In that light, notifications are important.

They also have the best automatic presence detection, it's miles ahead of iMessage in that (and almost every other) regard. I want to dislike it, but Facebook has done a stellar job making their messaging system bullet-proof.

I just downvoted you by accident, sorry. Maybe someone who really disagrees with parent can vote him up instead? :-)

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