Facebook client on iPhone not very stable?
By Ben Robinson on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 3:17 AM PST In Ideas and rants, Social Networking
Is it just me, or is the Facebook client for the iPhone not very stable? I’ve used it quite extensively recently, partly just testing out what functionality was ported over, but partly because it’s a convenient way to keep up-to-date with friends who use it (a lot more than I do, I might add).
However, the App is clearly an on-device/web mashup, which loads data elements from the site (as well as having it’s own stored framework/templates), and I wonder if this has been the issue during it’s frequent crashing recently.
What I am talking about is navigating tabbed categories fast, or perhaps not being patient enough for a pic to load on a wireless network, and hence moving somewhere else in the App – two common behaviours I should imagine in the time-challenged society we live in today. Both of these actions can cause the App to throw a tantrum and then not display feeds, contacts, or profile info.
Once the App is in a wobbly state, the simplest thing to do seems to be to terminate it with a long-push of the home button – but re-starting the App doesn’t solve it, as there seems to be some kind of persistent state storage.
It’s frustrating I feel, because it’s potentially a genuinely useful mobile extension of an already useful SN tool. Oh, and don’t even get me started on messages that you delete in the inbox, but which re-appear the next time you log in!
Anyways, what I want to know is – has anyone else experiencing this?
I wouldn’t necessarily ask if it’s not very stable, but rather if it’s stable at all.
The application, prior to update 2.2 has become almost unusable for me, returning a black screen every so often, plus the menu system goes in to some strange ‘infinite loop’ error, where the menu items keep on going with no text and they do nothing when pressed.
I could then start ranting about how frustrating it is to not yet have push, MMS and copy & paste, but I’ll leave my remark as it is!
Ever since the 2.0 update for the app, the event times all say “3 hours ago”. This issue has been posted by many users and there has been no word from the developer of it yet.
Facebook app page – http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6628568379
Totally agreed, I’ve also noted the consistent “3 Hours Ago”, but have also experienced the drop out of the data, you will see a list of statuses or friends or whatever on the iPhone and the end of the list will go blank. Then the remaining items no longer respond. Quite annoying really.
I have noticed the time issue. I am happy with the app, it doesn’t cause any more problems than any other app i use. I wouldnt’ say the problems are enough to complain about it so much. im sure what ever issues there are will be fixed in a future update.
Sometimes it seems to completely lose its connection to the server. After that point, you need to restart the app. For example, the first time I noticed this I was browsing my Friends list, and noticed that it started scrolling into whiteness instead of showing the friend names. Then when I went back to the other features of the app, nothing would refresh, etc. Restarting the app fixed it. I’ve experienced this a few times over the past 2 days.
I’ve noticed the app to hang up quite often where it becomes unresponsive and has to be restarted.
I experience this problem everyday. I though it had something to do with my iphone after a couple of restarting the phone and uninstalling and reinstalling the app.
Glad to know I’m not the only one with all of the above issues, just frequently enough to be an irritant, but not quite enough to take away the value of the app.
My biggest complaint is when I try to post a comment and get an error message. These usually come after my wittiest bonmots. Gee!