I can’t wrap my head around why Facebook employees can’t write a decent iPhone app for their social network.
The site has two modes for presenting the feed: top stories and most recent. Not a whole lot is known for certain about how top works, but the fact that some stories can be excluded in this mode is a fact. Since I don’t give a fuck about Facebook’s algorithms for picking news for me (they will never work properly), I always switch the feed to “most recent” mode. Until recently, the site stubbornly refused to remember this setting, shoving its shitty “top” at me every day. Thank God, with the latest change to the site’s design, it finally remembered how I read the news.
With the mobile app, though, everything is much worse. You have to choose this setting all over again every time you launch it.
Facebook already screwed the pooch once when it bet on HTML5 technologies (see Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS. Jonathan Dann). But moving the app to native platform code did not improve the situation much. Scrolling through the feed jerks every time (some genius is blocking the message-processing loop), and the feed updates with a substantial delay after the app starts. It’s scary to think how it works over there on Android. If you add to this Facebook’s atmosphere of pseudo-elitism, then a visit to the social network feels like a visit to the monkey house at the zoo. The latter, admittedly, is already only indirectly related to technology.
VKontakte’s client app is night and day compared with Facebook. None of the shortcomings mentioned are there, even though the networks have the same functions.