According to the New York Times, two anonymous Facebook engineers have revealed that the company has completely rebuilt its iOS app with a focus on optimising the application for speed. The design of the app will remain unchanged while the increased speed of the app should satisfy many unhappy users.
A significant amount of customers of Apple’s App Store that have downloaded the social network’s application have given it only a single star commenting on its slowness and that it is often “still loading” for long periods of time.
The engineers themselves were not actually authorised to talk about the unreleased app although they did include some additional information about the new faster application. They revealed that the app was built using Objective-C, a programming language used for iOS applications, rather than HTML5, the web-based markup language on which the current version is built.
According to the report, Dave Fetterman, an engineering manager at Facebook mentioned back in 2011 that the company chose to use the HTML5 coding so that it could take advantage of reusing programming code across multiple mobile platforms. However, while this made the engineers’ job much easier, it resulted in a frustrating experience for users.
Facebook also declined to provide any details about the new faster application which is reportedly currently being tested out by developers and set to be released later in the US summer.
Do you have Facebook’s app for iOS? Let us know your thoughts about it in the comments below.
