Everyone who owns an iPhone will tell you that Facebook’s iOS app is a hit or miss. On some days it works fine, while on others you end up staring at the loading screen for what feels like an eternity. Why’s this the case? Because today’s Facebook iOS app isn’t really an app, it’s a mobile optimized website that’s been disguised as an application. Facebook chose to go via the HTML5 route so that they could be nimble and push out features and updates on their server instead of having to deal with submitting a new version of their app to the App Store. That was obviously a mistake.
According to The New York Times, the company not only knows that people are frustrated with the current iOS app, but they’re also about a month away from launching a completely rewritten application that’s focused on one thing: SPEED. Said app is written entirely in native iOS code, so there goes the whole dream scenario of having web enabled applications.
How will this app look? The report says it looks exactly like today’s Facebook app, so don’t expect any new features or anything. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Facebook’s application, when it does work, is easy enough to navigate. Sure, it’s not as pretty as Google+ or Tumblr, but that’s not the point.
Speaking about social networks, yesterday Google released some statistics about their Facebook clone. Apparently they have 150 million users who use the site at least once a month. Half of those are on the site every day. That’s 75 million people. During March 2012 Facebook had an average of 526 million daily users. That’s over 7x more. Pretty pathetic when you consider that Google is promoting Google+ on their homepage, in Chrome, in Gmail, and pretty much every other consumer facing service.