I've been using iDevices for 3 years and I can honestly say that the Facebook app for iOS is the worst I've ever come across. Extremely many people complain about the fact that the application loads pages hard, crashes very often and closes out of the blue, it being practically a big, big black ball in the portfolio of the company that owns the Facebook social network. Although those from Facebook tried to fix the application through successive updates, their attempts were doomed to failure, but it seems that a completely redone version of the application is to be launched in the near future in the App Store.
According to two Facebook engineers who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak about unreleased products, Facebook has completely rebuilt its iOS application to optimize for one thing: speed... Many of the components of the current version of the Facebook app are built using HTML5, a Web-based programming language... The current version of the app is essentially an Objective-C shell with a Web browser inside. When it comes to speed, this is like putting the engine of a Smart Car in the body of a Ferrari.... Objective-C takes the opposite approach, taking full advantage of the hardware in the iPhone and then building most of the functionality directly into the application so it has to collect less information from the Web.
Even if Facebook said absolutely nothing about the launch of a new application for iDevices, a reporter from New York Times he managed to talk with some Facebook engineers and got to test the new application. It looks like it will keep the design we're already used to, but it will be completely rewritten using the Objective-C language, and that should eliminate the extremely bad functionality we're experiencing now. According to the New York Times, the new application will be available in the App Store sometime next month.
