Former Facebook for iPhone Developer Joe Hewitt Says iPad “Everything He's Been Wishing For”
Joe Hewitt, who developed the awesome Facebook 3.0, but controversially (and some would say detrimentally) left the iPhone platform before Facebook 3.1 over the App Store review process, has come out extremely positively about the iPad:
Context & Ripple Effects
Joe Hewitt built the iPhone-era Facebook client that TechCrunch crowned him for back in its 2007 profile — he shipped Facebook 3.0 for iPhone in August 2009 and open-sourced much of his toolkit as Three20 that spring. Then, per the confirmed record, he stopped developing the app before version 3.1, walking away over Apple's App Store review process.
That history is what makes his iPad verdict two days after launch more than a quote: the most prominent developer to quit Apple's ecosystem over gatekeeping says the device is everything he has been wishing for. It lands amid sharply split launch-day coverage — Daring Fireball and CNET weighing in alongside Ars Technica's report that Netflix won't stream to the device near-term and Adobe's blog asking whether the iPad is 'a broken link' for Flash.
First-order effects
- Apple gets an unforced credibility boost with exactly the developer audience it needs: the man who wrote its flagship social app endorsing the hardware despite having left over the review process.
- Facebook faces an awkward spotlight — the developer who built its iPhone presence is publicly excited about a form factor for which Facebook has announced nothing, while he himself is no longer on the project.
Second-order effects
- The episode sharpens the trade every major publisher now weighs: Hewitt's stance implies the hardware case can outweigh App Store review friction, raising the cost for rivals courting iOS developers to match the device without offering comparable distribution reach.
- Launch-day skepticism from content players — Netflix holding back streaming, Adobe flagging Flash gaps — means developer enthusiasm alone doesn't fill the device; media and web-platform partners become the next negotiation front.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform competition structurally splits into two judgments buyers and developers make separately — the device versus the store that gates it — with the App Store's take-rate and review regime as the durable battleground either way.
- Hewitt's arc from celebrated insider to critic-turned-cheerleader prefigures how the industry evaluates new computing platforms: through the public statements of a small set of marquee independent developers rather than through vendor messaging.
The trend: Tablet-era platform competition is being decided less by hardware specs than by whether distribution gatekeeping can coexist with the developers whose apps make a device worth buying.