Facebook For iOS App's Review Average Climbs From 1.5 Stars To 4 Stars In Three Weeks Since Relaunch
Facebook will still push HTML5 innovation, but stripping it out to speed up the Facebook for iOS app has been very successful. Half of its iOS users updated their apps in just four days …
Context & Ripple Effects
The rating recovery is the payoff to a story that has been building since June, when Facebook first pledged to speed up its iPhone app, and it crystallized in August when the company went fully native and stripped out HTML5. Two days before this report, Zuckerberg publicly conceded that betting on HTML5 for mobile was a mistake — a rare admission from a founder whose company's stock had fallen more than 50% since its May IPO.
The stakes were reputational as much as technical: Facebook's last major iPhone overhaul drew attention back in 2009 with version 3.0, but by mid-2012 the app's 1.5-star average had become shorthand for the company's mobile struggles at exactly the moment advertisers and investors were questioning whether Facebook could monetize phones at all. The breadth of pickup — CNET, VentureBeat, The Next Web, parislemon and others running the same numbers on the same day — shows how closely the market was watching any evidence the fix worked.
First-order effects
- Half of Facebook's iOS users updated within four days of the relaunch, giving the company a fast-moving base on its fastest-growing platform just as it pushes new ad products like the exchange unveiled this week.
- The 1.5-to-4-star climb removes the most visible public symbol of Facebook's mobile deficit, easing pressure on a team already stung by Zuckerberg's own admission that the HTML5 bet was one of several missteps.
Second-order effects
- With the app finally fast enough to retain daily use, Facebook can route its growing Web-ad monetization efforts — including ways to earn more from inventory it already sells — into mobile placements without the performance drag undermining them.
- Rivals building cross-platform apps on HTML5 now face a visible counterexample: Facebook's experience hands every native-first competitor an argument that hybrid approaches cost real user goodwill.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's brief flirtation with write-once HTML5 app frameworks gives way to native development as the default for consumer-scale products, with engineering budgets following — a shift Zuckerberg's September 11 mea culpa already signaled from the top.
- App Store ratings become a board-level metric for consumer internet companies, since a sub-2-star average is now demonstrably something a public company will rebuild its entire mobile stack to escape.
The trend: Consumer platforms are abandoning HTML5 hybrid apps for native rebuilds as mobile performance shifts from an engineering detail to a direct driver of ratings, retention, and ad revenue.