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back to article Facebook updates iOS app, still poking around for mobile dollars

Facebook is yet to crack the mobile revenue conundrum as its stock continues to be hammered on Wall Street, but in the meantime the company has finally updated its dog of an iOS app. Shares hardly rallied following Facebook's announcement yesterday that the Apple mobile version of its network had now been updated – instead …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lucky Bill Ray

    A lot of non-Nexus android devices have the bloody Facebook app on it by default as manufacturer crapware, and you have to root the damn thing to get rid of it (looking at you, Samsung and HTC).

    I really like Android, but really dislike the manufacturer crapware that is an attempt to "differentiate"- it's getting like laptop crapware, only harder to remove.

    (My Nexus 7 is less annoying in that respect than my Galaxy S3)

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    1. g e
      Reply Icon

      Re: Lucky Bill Ray

      My S3 didn't come with Farmbook, which was a pleasant surprise.

      It always irritated me that I couldn't remove it from my previous Desire HD

      I really wish Google would put permissions switches into the system so you could deny stuff to apps - like location to Farmbook for example. It's always making the location icon blink, prompting me to turn off GPS which then annoys me when I turn satnav on and it reminds me to re-enable it.

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    2. JDX Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Lucky Bill Ray

      Why bother rooting to save a few hundred Kb, you could just not use it?

      I just use the proper version of the site on my tablet anyway.

      1 1
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Lucky Bill Ray

        You bother rooting to get titanium backup, of course. As a side effect, you can get rid of crapware.

        Getting rid of Facebook is mostly because I don't want it on my phone, because I have kicked the habit :)

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      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Lucky Bill Ray

        No need for the FB app on WP7. You can read, update and post content to Facebook and other sites without an app. It's really quick and clean too. Facebook private messages appear like texts in your messaging tile and you can move the conversation to text if you want.

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        1. JDX Gold badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Lucky Bill Ray

          WP7 FB functionality is very good but it's not a complete replacement... if you simply want to browse FB it doesn't (appear to) let you.

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      3. TraceyC
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        Re: Lucky Bill Ray

        There are two very good reasons to bother rooting the phone to get rid of the Farcebook app.

        1 - I bought the phone, I own it. It's up to *me* what applications run on it, not the mobile provider or manufacturer. You wouldn't accept a 5 foot cube with adverts being installed in your car's passenger seat by the dealership would you? After all, you could just use the other space for passengers.

        2 - For lower end phones with limited storage, getting rid of the crapplications saves a significant amount of space.

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    3. dotdavid
      Reply Icon

      Re: Lucky Bill Ray

      ICS and above makes things a bit better by allowing you to "disable" apps (even the manufacturer pre-installed ones). However you really need to know which ones can be disabled so it's not for the newbies.

      I wonder if there's a market for an app with associated bloatware DB which could hold your hand through the process, allowing you to select/unselect apps to disable and then pop up the Android disable dialog for each app like many of the "move apps to SD" apps do (which is incidently a feature that seemingly has been removed by Google for some reason in ICS, at least in my S3).

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    4. jaduncan
      Reply Icon

      Re: Lucky Bill Ray

      Android 4.0 or above can disable any preinstalled app; just go to the apps section in the system settings.

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  2. Silverburn
    FAIL

    I just got a Farcebook update for Android just the other day.

    Since then it has crashed 10x, and keeps losing it's connection. What a PoS. At least the old version was stable.

    Yay, progress.

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    1. Bodhi
      Reply Icon

      Glad it's not just me that's noticed this. The old version was half decent, fairly stable and did what you want a Facebook app to do. This new one appears to be dragging my Xperia S down to a crawl and crashes more often than Takuma Sato after a bottle of sake.

      Pure, unadulterated bilge.

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      1. Richard Wharram
        Reply Icon

        Just updated to the new one on the wife's Galaxy S Bods and it was dogshit but since I'm used to the old iOS one this didn't shock exactly.

        P.S. CTFOADOA :)

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  3. Ged T
    Meh

    I uninstalled this app from my S3

    It was pre-installed.

    When the last update got notified, I noticed that the app had changed such that it could access both cameras, in 'still' or video mode, microphone / record, full filesystem access, full phone (log) access, ability to make and answer calls ... I don't need to go on ...

    I uninstalled it.

    I continue to use an app to access Facebook (tm).

    Its called, er... errmmm... Oh Yeh....

    The web browser...

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  4. James 51

    Who wrote the facebook app for BB and the playbook?

    0 0
    1. sinfocomar
      Reply Icon
      IT Angle

      RIM

      The best social networks client (Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn) is on every Blackberry. Completely integrated with BBM.

      0 0
  5. jai

    appcelerator

    Wasn't the Facebook app the poster child for Appcelerator's Titanium IDE that allowed you to write apps in javascript(-ish) and then build for both iOS and Android?

    From the sounds of it, they've scrapped that method entirely and have built it instead in Objective-C.

    2 0
    1. mtbj
      Reply Icon

      Re: appcelerator

      Looking inside the IPA, it doesn't look like much like it's a Titanium app - some nib files in there. (iOS version, FB4110.0)

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  6. Richard Wharram

    It is much better

    Anyone who's seen my posts here about the previous iOS app will know that I regarded it as the buggiest, slowest piece of dog-egg that I've ever used. It is MUCH better now in the bits they've updated. However, they haven't updated it all. The Messages functionality is still pretty much unusable. I suspect that a lot of the other less-used parts of the app are still in need of a re-code too.

    Overall, a B+.

    1 0
  7. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    "Meanwhile, Facebook fans with Android-loaded handsets will continue to have to play the waiting game as the dominant social network is yet to update that version of its app."

    Really? I've had updates for my HTC Desire and Nexus 7 over the past day or two.

    The app's still a load of shit, though.

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Regarding disabling apps

    I might be dim or something, but I never did see that option on my (non-operator, basic Samsung) S3:

    http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/1002/20120824144335.png

    Am I looking in the right place? That's where HOWTOs tell me to look..

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    1. dotdavid
      Reply Icon

      Re: Regarding disabling apps

      You're looking in the right place Mr Coward, but for some odd reason Android wants you to click "Uninstall Updates" before it will let you disable. The "Disable" button will be where the "Uninstall Updates" button is in your screenshot.

      1 0
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Regarding disabling apps

        Ah, so it does. Thanks, dotdavid.. "I learned something today", and won't have to put up with it downloading updates for things I don't give a fig about. Yay, time to hunt down all that weird Samsung crapware and squish it :)

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  9. Mark Dowling
    Thumb Down

    More native code

    What say you, HTML5 people? Is Facebook just doing it wrong? I know the "HTML5" page Blackberry Playbooks access for Twitter is rubbish for one.

    0 0
    1. JDX Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: More native code

      Well the gmail and Kindle apps work just great so it's bad coding not bad tools.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fat App

    It does seem faster on IOS.

    The new version will be fine so long as they've sorted the amount of data the app takes up, previous version beefing up to over 500 Mb within a few months.

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  11. Senior Ugli
    Megaphone

    it is alot faster on iOS. Few new nice UI touches too. But things like the sidebar reveal - just show how much better performance there is coding native compared to a webkit wrapper

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  12. JeffyPooh
    Pint

    Facebook on iOS, "Oops, we forgot copy-and-paste..."

    No copy-and-paste in the latest and greatest FB app.

    If someone posts a photo, and then includes a related URL in the photo caption, it appears as an unclickable URL that is also impossible to copy. No known solution. Maybe start Googling for related terms?

    Major FAIL.

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  13. Peter Holroyd
    Unhappy

    Make the app before you make money

    It sounds like Facebook are 12 months away from a useable app, at which point they can monetise the dam things. Which means shareholder confidence and consumer satisfaction will both be on the floor along with their share price by then.

    Are Zuckerberg and co making it up as they go along or is there actually a plan?

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