Facebook has recently released a major update on its app (application) for Apple’s mobile platform iOS, rebuilding it from the ground up and addressing complaints which the previous iteration of the app faced on mobile platforms, including the big one that the app took forever to load on mobile devices with standard connectivity.
The new app was released on August 23 with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s billionaire CEO and co-founder, posting on his Facebook wall: “We just released a new Facebook app for iPhone and iPad and it’s a lot faster … It’s a big step forward.”
The app has by and large received positive reviews with several users finding the company’s claim of making it “twice as fast as before” true. In a media statement, Mick Johnson, Product Manager, noted that “Facebook 5.0 for iOS is twice as fast as the previous version when launching the app, scrolling through news feed and opening photos in feed.”
Leading technology blogs that analysed the app have said the big difference in the new version is that Facebook developers have used Apple iOS’ native environment to build the app rather than embedding HTML5 code that they used across mobile platforms. That made the previous versions of the app appear clunky and slow, a complaint that haunts users on some Android devices till date. The expectation now is that Facebook will replicate the advantages in its iOS platform
Facebook is the world’s biggest online social network, with the company claiming 995 million active monthly users in June this year. Of them, 543 million users log in using Facebook mobile applications to access the network. It has apps that run in over 2,000 mobile devices.
