Current State of the FaceBook for iPhone App

Facebook, love it or hate it, is here to stay. With 750 million active users, Facebook is undoubtedly the largest social network in the world. More than 250 million of Facebook users access their profiles from a mobile device. That is a huge chunk of the total user base. Exactly how many of those users are accessing Facebook from an iPhone I don’t know but it has to be a lot as the FaceBook app is ALWAYS in the top 25 apps in the AppStore.

So you would assume that a company as large as Facebook with their many developers could provide their iPhone users with a near flawless application with which to update their status from, right? WRONG! The Facebook app has a start rating of 2 in the AppStore, it would be one were it not for the handful of people that don’t seem to have any issues with it.

Two stars?? Facebook? Go and check it out for yourself, the poor reviews make interesting reading. The app has gone downhill since Joe Hewitt quit working on it, so who is working on it now? Geohot? Doubtful, even he wouldn’t release unfinished applications like this.

So what exactly makes the Facebook app the bane of so many peoples daily lives? There are many reasons but to name a few;

• Constant crashing – Nearly every bad review mentions crashing of some sort, heck some people can’t even open the app without it crashing.
• Inability to perform the simplest tasks such as commenting on a friends status or uploading a photo.
• Loading……loading…..loading! We all seem to have one persistent friend that stalks us all at one time or another – his name is Loading!
• Non existent updates – I am currently suffering from this one. The last update that Facebook released 3 days ago was a major update. It claimed to give users the ability to tag friends and locations in status updates. I see no evidence of this whatsoever, the version number shows latest and I see changes to the profile tab, but I like many still see the old status update page, why? How is it possible that some see the updated features and others don’t? below is an example of what it “used” to look like and what it “should” look like;

So the above is the old style with just the option to change who can view your status update.

Below is how it “should”appear now, new buttons new functions.Sadly I like many still see the old style. Maybe Facebook released the new features and then pulled that version quickly, if that is the case then some kind of statement to that effect would please a lot of users.

How has your experience been while using the Facebook app?