Facebook Plans to Speed Up its iPhone App
Facebook's iPhone app is slow. Often painfully slow. — On the iTunes app store, out of 38,000 reviews, more than 21,000 customers have given the app a measly single star. Users repeatedly describing the app as: slow, crashes, stinks, fail and “is always loading.”
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's iPhone client has been a sore point almost since inception — the company was touting version 2.0 of the app back in 2008 — but the complaint has hardened into a ratings crisis: more than 21,000 of 38,000 iTunes reviews are single-star, with users describing an app that is 'always loading.' The company now says a speed fix is planned.
The timing matters because Facebook just paid roughly $1 billion for Instagram in April 2012, buying the gold standard for fast, polished iPhone photography apps while its own flagship client lags. The story also travelled unusually wide on the day — pickups at CNET, TUAW, MacRumors, ReadWriteWeb and four other outlets — signaling that mobile quality has become a reputational issue, not just a support-ticket one.
First-order effects
- Facebook's iOS engineering team gets a mandate shift toward raw performance — startup time, feed loading, crash rates — since those are exactly what the one-star reviews cite.
- Every future Facebook release will be judged against this backlog of 21,000 one-star ratings; the App Store score becomes a public scoreboard the company must climb out of.
Second-order effects
- The episode sharpens the industry argument over hybrid versus native mobile development — if Facebook's approach is the bottleneck, rivals building on similar web-wrapped architectures face pressure to justify or abandon them.
- Instagram-style native polish becomes the competitive bar for social apps on iOS, forcing competitors to match perceived responsiveness rather than feature checklists.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large consumer platforms treat app-store review aggregates as a first-class product metric, with dedicated rewrites triggered by rating collapse rather than roadmap cycles.
- Mobile clients drift from thin wrappers around web services toward fully native codebases, raising the cost of multi-platform parity and pushing companies toward platform-specific teams.
The trend: Consumer internet companies are being pushed by app-store review economics to abandon shared web-based mobile code in favor of native rebuilds when ratings crater.