Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Facebook iOS App Ditching HTML5 For ObjectiveC

Posted by samzenpus on from the goodbye-5 dept.

Wrath0fb0b writes "The New York Times reports that Facebook is overhauling their iOS App to ditch their HTML5 based UI for a native ObjectiveC one. This is an about face from their position a few months ago in which FB said HTML5 would allow them to write once run anywhere. While WORA certainly has a lot of appeal for both programmers (due to desire not to duplicate effort) and management alike (due to desire not to pay programmers to duplicate effort), the large number of negative reviews that FB for iOS has illustrate that this approach is not without drawbacks. No matter how the new app is received, this is more fuel on the native vs. web-app fire."

2 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Re:About time by Korin43 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think the problem with the Facebook "app" was that it didn't seem to store anything locally -- meaning every UI event involved a request over the internet, which does not make for a responsive UI.

  2. But will it help? by FellowConspirator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It seems to me that the Facebook app's issues are not so much about HTML5 performance, but rather the way that they handle transactions with their servers. The network performance of the app is atrocious. Look at the traffic of the iOS app and compare it to the Facebook mobile website. How many hundreds of XMLHTTPRequests do you think it should take to render a page?

    There's nothing inherently wrong with the HTML5, it's their ludicrous network activity that kills the app.