Facebook is a really, really popular app. They cannot get away with good effort alone. They must make their mobile app flawless and reliable, because if only a couple of users out of hundreds of millions publicly criticize their app, this hurts their reputation badly.
I do not agree with what most people are saying. HTML5, CSS, Javascript are already good enough standards for 99% of all apps.
The real problem lies with the popular mobile browsers. Anybody who ever tried developing a rich interface for Mobile Safari and for Android knows just how bad things are - and some people think having to support IExplorer 6 was painful.
Also, at least on iOS, the browser has better performance than a WebUI embedded in an app. From what I know the web component doesn't use the same Javascript engine for instance. Also, not sure if this changed, but on iOS 4 you couldn't upload files from the mobile browser (file fields in forms were deactivated). You also couldn't automatically place the focus on a form field, to force the keyboard to pop, because you couldn't trigger any mouse/keyboard event other than in response to a physical user action (I think this was a problem with mobile WebKit in general). And I also experienced many problems with Android's browser. I can't even remember all of them.
> They must make their mobile app flawless and reliable, because if only a couple of users out of hundreds of millions publicly criticize their app, this hurts their reputation badly.
Vehemently disagree. I know very few apps that are flawless and reliable, including Apple's native apps. A couple of users have already publicly criticized the app for YEARS now and it hasn't hurt their reputation to the point where they are losing users. Facebook has power because of the network effect. People are willing to deal with a flawed experience as long as the network effect is left in tact. Facebook will need to worry about a flawless app experience when the network effect diminishes.
The difference is that iOS allows Mobile Safari to turn memory areas into code pages, which is what you need to do to JIT JavaScript. It doesn't trust other apps not to be able to exploit that somehow, so UIWebView is not allowed to do this.
They would rather do that then open an exploit possibility. As a user, I prefer that trade-off. It would bother me if I relied on PhoneGap or something similar, but in practice, the performance really isn't that bad.
IMHO, HTML5 isn't the issue. It's just a convenient scapegoat to distract investors from the fact that they either lack technical prowess in mobile app development (fairly unlikely...) or simply have poor leadership, vision and direction to deal with the challenges of mobile apps. To succeed in mobile, Facebook needs their own ecosystem.
Apple, Google and Amazon are years ahead of Facebook at this point and they have a tremendous upper hand right now. I don't see how Facebook can continue their growth in the current post-PC world. They've basically peaked at this point with their facebook.com site, and for future growth my bet is that they'll start growing through acquisitions. Sounds like yahoo.com to me.
What I don't get is why facebook has to be an app at all. If you build it as a purely browser-based app, you can get better performance than running it in a UIWebView, and updates can be pushed out without anyone's permission. With HTML5 app cache you can get the "instant launch" experience that a native app gives you. For interacting with the camera they could have used a helper app.
Why are people so desperate to put their free non-ad-supported apps in apple's app store? It doesn't make any sense to me. I recently built an offline web app using sencha touch, and it works great. No install necessary, just "add to homescreen".
Facebook is a really, really popular app. They cannot get away with good effort alone. They must make their mobile app flawless and reliable, because if only a couple of users out of hundreds of millions publicly criticize their app, this hurts their reputation badly.
I do not agree with what most people are saying. HTML5, CSS, Javascript are already good enough standards for 99% of all apps.
The real problem lies with the popular mobile browsers. Anybody who ever tried developing a rich interface for Mobile Safari and for Android knows just how bad things are - and some people think having to support IExplorer 6 was painful.
Also, at least on iOS, the browser has better performance than a WebUI embedded in an app. From what I know the web component doesn't use the same Javascript engine for instance. Also, not sure if this changed, but on iOS 4 you couldn't upload files from the mobile browser (file fields in forms were deactivated). You also couldn't automatically place the focus on a form field, to force the keyboard to pop, because you couldn't trigger any mouse/keyboard event other than in response to a physical user action (I think this was a problem with mobile WebKit in general). And I also experienced many problems with Android's browser. I can't even remember all of them.