Facebook Is Basically Forcing Its Employees To Use Android Phones Because Its Android App Is Just Awful
Facebook just updated its iPhone app. Great! — That's no consolation to its employees, who are increasingly getting nudged, cajoled, and even ordered to give up their iPhones for Android devices.
Context & Ripple Effects
The push comes on the heels of Facebook's June pledge to speed up its iPhone app (Facebook Plans to Speed Up its iPhone App), which has now landed as a native rebuild of the iOS client — syndicated widely by The Verge, NYT Bits, Phone Arena and Android outlets on the same day. The irony is that fixing iOS has exposed how far behind the Android app sits, so management is turning its own workforce into the fix: employees are being nudged and ordered off iPhones and onto Android devices.
It is also not new territory for the company — Phandroid reported back in November 2010 on Facebook's early Android efforts — but this is the first time device assignment inside the company is being used explicitly as a product-quality lever rather than a perk.
First-order effects
- Facebook employees who prefer iPhones are being required or strongly encouraged to carry Android devices day-to-day, making the company's own staff the primary test base for an app widely criticized as poor quality.
- The Android app team gets a much larger internal user population reporting bugs and performance problems, directly after the iOS team proved the payoff of a ground-up native rewrite.
Second-order effects
- Google gains a high-profile ally in closing Facebook's Android gap — a better Facebook app strengthens Android's case against the iPhone at the exact moment Facebook's iOS rebuild resets user expectations on both platforms.
- Apple loses internal advocacy at one of the most influential mobile developers in the world, a symbolic blow to the iPhone-centric culture that dominated Facebook's workforce until now.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'droidfooding' — assigning employees the devices their weakest product runs on — becomes standard practice at consumer internet companies, tying internal IT policy directly to platform-parity roadmaps.
- For major app developers, maintaining feature parity across iOS and Android stops being optional: a visibly second-class client on either platform now carries organizational consequences, not just user complaints.
The trend: Mobile-first companies are increasingly using employee device mandates as an engineering tool to force quality parity across iOS and Android, reflecting Android's scale as a platform no major developer can leave second-class.