Facebook’s iOS app has some nice features, but it’s painfully, neck-stiffening slow. It won’t be for long though. The New York Times reports that Facebook will release an update next month that’ll completely overhaul the app to make it blazing fast.
Why has the Facebook app been so slow? Because the current version of the app is nothing more than a web browser inside an Objective-C shell. Stuff is being constantly pulled from the web, hence the lag time. The next Facebook app will replace all that sluggish sludge by using more Objective-C, which in turn would use more of the iPhone’s hardware, and as the Times puts it, “building most of the functionality directly into the application so it has to collect less information from the web.”
Nick Bilton of the New York Times had some hands-on time with the app and says it’s “blazing fast”. More faster, more Facebook. [New York Times]