A Faster Facebook for iOS

http://newsroom.fb.com/News/A-Faster-Facebook-for-iOS-1b4.aspx

by adamjernst • 14 years ago

273 177 14 years ago

newsroom.fb.com

thomseddon• 14 years ago

Google's cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

(down at time of writing)

destraynor• 14 years ago

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

mootothemax• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Is there somewhere else for them to go?

brink• 14 years ago

Google+?

seiji2• 14 years ago

Inelastic demand lets you screw users in all kinds of creative ways. Also see: craigslist, crappy dating sites, and news.yc.

powrtoch• 14 years ago

What are the creative ways in which HN screws us?

dreamdu5t2• 14 years ago

Facebook has no demand, it's free. There's no way to establish supply/demand without a price.

jmduke• 14 years 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.

SoftwareMaven3• 14 years 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.

flatline319• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

why-el• 14 years 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.

hdoan741• 14 years ago

Facebook may put announcement (or that sort) in their app to let people know that they should upgrade.

pdog• 14 years ago

It's more complicated than you make it out to be.

Facebook has to work consistently on so many different platforms (not just iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone; also, the billion+ feature phones out there) and continuous deployment is the process at the heart of Facebook (the motto: move fast, break things).

Facebook is always adding new features and improvements. By using Web technologies, they can share code and make these changes on the server side, not to ease developers' efficiency but to guarantee interoperability and a consistent user experience.

flatline319• 14 years ago

> It's more complicated than you make it out to be.

I didn't make it out to be simple or complicated. They valued their sense of developer efficiency over user experience.

rburhum2• 14 years ago

Since mobile is their biggest growth platform and considering that they have the resources, I just don't see this as a strong argument. I always thought it was very silly that the website ran better and faster in Safari vs the "native" app.

SoftwareMaven3• 14 years ago

That assumes developer efficiency is what they were optimizing for. If, on the other hand, they were optimizing in a way that attempted to trivialize mobile to drive people to the (more profitable for them) desktop, then then entire experience makes sense from a product perspective.

jamesaguilar• 14 years ago

Or maybe a space alien told them that they must do it in HTML5, as long as we're trading in unlikely hypotheses.

flatline319• 14 years ago

I based my assessment on Facebook's public statements regarding their choice of technologies, rather than assuming some sort of deep conspiracy.

It's basic organizational politics. Any organization will have difficulty adapting to a completely different platform, and management will attempt to reframe the problem to fit within the bounds of their existing organization.

In this case, a traditionally web-focused organization attempted to co-opt mobile development into their existing organizational hierarchy by reframing the problem. It wasn't until persistent external pressure was applied (user complaint, blatant failure obvious to external management) that they were forced to accede ground.

sidcool2• 14 years ago

Can you pls explain the issue in more detail or mention a link?

xstm• 14 years ago

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/redux_how_facebook_mobi...

tptacek4• 14 years ago

Choosing platforms to optimize developer experience enables you to get more features out the door faster, which is usually the right decision when you don't know precisely which feature set the market is going to value. After a year or two of experience, it's a lot easier to go back and pick a different platform to optimize for something else.

flatline319• 14 years ago

Trade-offs to accommodate your resource or skill contraints are just that -- trade-offs. They're not optimal solutions for your users or your products. Singular dedication to user experience may have an intangible value, but Apple and others have consistently demonstrated that the value is high.

This isn't a trade-off Facebook needed to make. Whether it's a trade-off your organization needs to make depends on your resource availability, skills, and target market. However, there's no value in dressing up the trade-off as anything other than a trade-off.

The target market and product factors into the question of resource allocation. Nest would not have made such a splash if they decided to skip user experience and focus on fast feature roll-out, and Dropbox would not have succeeded to nearly the same degree (if at all) without first-rate native user experience.

thinkingisfun• 14 years ago

"Choosing platforms to optimize developer experience enables you to get more features out the door faster"

That is correct in theory, but falls on the face with facebook and others. Unless you literally just mean "more features", and not improving what they're making. E.g. paying for promoted updates so friends see them in their cluttered stream surely is Yet Another Feature, but is it good? I guess it depends on who the market is, here..

If the thing were written in spaghetti code, it would at least mean people would have some time to think in between, or even manage to get out of their 20s before their redefine how grandma keeps in touch.

Still, I'm happy that they improved how their crappy soulless product runs on another crappy soulless product, it keeps them off the street.

weixiyen• 14 years ago

"a year or two" - that's quite a long time to be testing something. Also I'm not sure how much of a time to market advantage they gained from using UIWebView, if any. There's simply no evidence to support it. Everything points to internal politics.

Androsynth2• 14 years ago

This HN meme that all companies should be like Apple is getting a bit ridiculous. FB has always been an efficient engineering organizing that pushes out features constantly. They don't derive their value from their UI nor have they ever. There is no reason for them to start copying Apple now.

FB users don't use it because of the slick interfaces, they use it because of network effects. For that type of business, adding features fast (to create more lock-in) > focusing on great UI.

shadesandcolour3• 14 years ago

Who says Facebook needs to be like Apple? No one is arguing that Facebook needs to change or make their UI better than it was or that it was even a feature they cared about. The issue was the experience delivered by the client they had out, which sucked. They picked a technology which everyone knew would be slower in order to make it easier on their mobile team. Instead of investing in an Android team and an iOS team, they wanted to make the code portable. Sadly using a UIWebView comes with zero benefits on iOS and Facebook suffered for that. They should have kept their native client in the first place. The point of using a web view is so that you can rapidly prototype features and UI, and as far as I can remember, Facebook did very little of that on mobile anyways.

flatline319• 14 years ago

> They don't derive their value from their UI nor have they ever.

I'd be interested in your supporting arguments, especially in light of this investment they just made entirely for UX reasons.

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

They also made a bet on HTML5 closing the gap on native app platforms over time. But the bet turned out to be wrong as the gap has actually increased.

jamoes• 14 years ago

Using a UIWebView has benefits other than just developer efficiency. If Facebook wanted to run A/B tests in a serious capacity, they needed the ability to make many changes to thier UI quickly. With the 2 week turnaround on app submissions, as well as the tendency for certain users to not update their apps, they could potentially be waiting years for the results of iterative A/B testing if they stuck with a purely native app.

Now that they've had the opportunity to fully A/B test their app, and they have a good sense of what users find valuable (based on this news story, the news feed and photos), it makes sense to switch to a more performant native app.

jcromartie3• 14 years ago

Based on a conversation with someone who worked on the UIWebView-based Facebook app, there were no real productivity gain either. The web app inside the native wrapper was an insane byzantine mess, as is often the case with this sort of app.

MatthewPhillips4• 14 years ago

Did it different significantly from the mobile site? From the looks of it, it shouldn't be that complicated at all. 2 views in a carousel (sidebar and the main list). No transitions, no real attempt at being app like. Doesn't look like it should be that complicated to build.

mbesto3• 14 years ago

Actually, I'd argue they optimized for Accessibility, which is arguably the most important aspect of any mass online experience.

JumpCrisscross2• 14 years ago

The Fb web app was originally hailed as a triumph for web technologies, e.g. HTML5, which some believed was going to kill the app store model. Fb's web-centric (versus app-centric) employees would be susceptible to this view - they probably the move was viewed as being in the long-run best interest of the users. One can imagine an alternative outcome where competitive pressures forced Apple to upgrade its web application functionality to where the Fb app became not only competitive with native apps but, owing to its head start, shone as brightly as its first native app did in the app store.

With the benefit of hindsight the move was biased by ideology. The takeaway should be pragmatism over ideology and intellectual aesthetics, not the super-prioritisation of UX.

Note that around the same time, the Financial Times jumped off iOS and went pure HTML5. For them this turned out to be a good move - it is a delight to use.

evanlong• 14 years ago

You sir are genius for this line: "product quality for some notion of engineering perfectionism -- whatever it might be -- you're not doing your job as a professional engineer"

noamsml• 14 years ago

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

avolcano• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

pjmlp2• 14 years 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.

dodecaphonic2• 14 years ago

I love the energy itself that people are putting into making the web more of an app development platform. It's commendable how strongly and energetically they push to get there, building cool demos and frameworks that on a relative scale (i.e. from the web of ten years ago to the web of today) seem magical. But, frankly, more and more I feel like you, and more and more all that effort seems wasted on bringing everything up to par with old desktop patterns and techniques when we could all instead push everything somewhere new.

Like you I write web apps, but I'm old enough/lucky enough to have had some other experiences, and to be quite honest I find even Gtk+ is more pleasant overall than the MV* framework of the month. That we have folks now trying to write AutoCAD or Photoshop in JavaScript just like a loss for our industry.

tsurantino• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Objective-C. Check out the engineering blog post here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

jarito• 14 years ago

It's Objective-C with some fallback rendering for HTML5 stuff (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...)

chrisdroukas• 14 years ago

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

brittohalloran3• 14 years 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.

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

I remember showing a coworker when that change came out. "Hey, look, the new FB app is pretty buggy."

recursive• 14 years ago

That's intentional?!? I thought I just had a non-standard resolution or something. It really looks like crap.

brittohalloran3• 14 years 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?MediaDetails...

mbell• 14 years 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.

brittohalloran3• 14 years ago

Yeah that's pretty bad. Some in my feed are a meme pictures with writing on the top and bottom that make no sense because the words are cut off.

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

> 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.

This sort of thing is especially odd given their face recognition on every photo. Surely they could have it center over the faces.

nopal• 14 years ago

I like it. I think it gives a nice sense of layering of content and accentuates the photos.

dude_abides• 14 years ago

No love for Android users? :(

marknutter2• 14 years ago

And therein lies the rub. Native development comes with its drawbacks too.

esilverberg2• 14 years 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...

Xuzz2• 14 years ago

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

jpxxx2• 14 years ago

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

playhard• 14 years ago

Finally! Huge improvement.

DonnyV3• 14 years ago

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

sazpaz2• 14 years ago

Despite more uniques coming from Android, maybe iOS user show more engagement.

goatforce5• 14 years 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....

zeroonetwothree• 14 years ago

Possibly because most of the employees use iOS...

billeh• 14 years ago

Much easier to optimize for three very similar phones versus hundreds (thousands?) of Android phones?

wallflower• 14 years 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.

shadesandcolour3• 14 years 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.

koyote• 14 years ago

Having used the android version from since it first came out:

It definitely needs to be rewritten for Android.

notatoad• 14 years ago

Android has the market share, iOS has the usage share. Lots of people get android phones who have no desire to use it as a smartphone, they just get a free phone that happens to be android. iPhone users actually use their iPhones for Facebook and web browsing and other smartphone tasks.

sazpaz2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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?

tnorthcutt2• 14 years ago

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

davidradcliffe• 14 years ago

It seems strange that they'd use .NET/aspx on that site.

antirez• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

The desktop client is their website.

sidcool2• 14 years ago

Android users waiting...

jbverschoor2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

jbverschoor2• 14 years ago

Indeed... that was (and still is) a huge threat to facebook. Performance doesn't mean this is the best way for MSNS

murki• 14 years 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.

SG-• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

about bloody time!

Baba_Chaghaloo• 14 years ago

A faster, more terminal cancer. Oh happy day.

dirkdk• 14 years 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

nicolasmiller• 14 years 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.

bsaul2• 14 years 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...

dreamdu5t2• 14 years ago

Why start with iOS and not Android? Seriously!?

programminggeek• 14 years 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.

anuraj• 14 years ago

Bye Bye HTML5!

denzil_correa• 14 years 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.

nathan_f77• 14 years 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.

A Faster Facebook for iOS

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