

Dear Facebook: Please learn how to design Android apps that don't suck - mariuz
http://blogs.computerworld.com/android/21684/facebook-android-apps

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jsvaughan
Regardless of how good it is, I don't feel comfortable installing it because
of the permissions it requires. You don't lose much by visiting fb.com in a
browser.

Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera. This permission
allows the app to use the camera at any time without your confirmation.

Allows the app to read data about your contacts stored on your phone,
including the frequency with which you've called, emailed, or communicated in
other ways with specific individuals. This permission allows apps to save your
contact data, and malicious apps may share contact data without your
knowledge.

Allows the app to modify the data about your contacts stored on your phone,
including the frequency with which you've called, emailed, or communicated in
other ways with specific contacts. This permission allows apps to delete
contact data.

Allows the app to access the phone features of the device. This permission
allows the app to determine the phone number and device IDs, whether a call is
active, and the remote number connected by a call.

~~~
nikolak
But is it possible to allow app to take pictures (when you want), import
contacts (if you want), sync contacts (again, optional) etc without those
permissions?

I'm not an android developer, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but
usually those permissions sound like you're giving up all your data but in
reality it's just used to do something simple as to prevent
vibration/ringing/notifications while you're talking on the phone.

~~~
nroman
It is not possible. This is a serious flaw in Android's permissions model IMO.
Everything must be asked for up-front in the app's manifest. You cannot ask
for more permissions at run time.

[http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/permissio...](http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/permissions.html)

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perbu
Facebooks engineering seems to have weird priorities. They seem put all their
effort into crazy stuff like "Graph Search" whilst ignoring incredibly
annoying issues like not having a basic search engine to find your own posts
or having two week old posts showing up in the stream approximately 20% of the
time. I'm guessing it is a lack of self discipline. Everyone wants to solve
the sexy problems but no-one works on debugging the old year race condition
that has been bugging everyone.

~~~
CWIZO
Don't forget that they need to invent a new way to shove "find new friends"
down my throat, every second week.

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Claudus
I've been "using" the Android Facebook app for over a year, maybe two and it
seems to have gotten worse over time, at least in the past year. The "new"
version doesn't seem to be any better.

I was at talk trying to check for a message using the app with limited success
yesterday, before I finally gave up and used the Android RealVNC app to remote
connect to one of my home systems, open a web browser, and connect to Facebook
that way.

I'm really unsure what the issue is here. Is it just really hard to make a
decent app? Is Facebook not devoting enough resources to development? Is the
development team really bad? Do they not know how terrible their app is? Are
developers of the needed caliber in too short supply?

~~~
ibrahima
Err, why use VNC instead of just using a local browser in desktop mode?

~~~
Claudus
Mostly because the icon was on the same screen, and I'm already logged in on
my home system, and I didn't want to type my email / password in again.

Maybe I should do that in the future.

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CWIZO
I stopped using the FB app since it was so slow it was painful . It was much
faster using FB trough the browser. Then FB released the new FB app in
December and I installed it again. It was super, it only took a second or so
to display the news feed when you launched it.

But about two weeks ago everything went down hill. Sometimes it took up to a
minute to actually display anything and most of the time at least 20 seconds
(all over wi-fi). So I uninstalled it again.

What baffles me is that they don't notice this or that they just don't care.

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hayksaakian
They literally have had to force staff to carry android devices to experience
it first hand.

They have been shoving dog food down their employees mouths because they are
aware of how bad it is.

~~~
joshAg
are android devices really that unpopular there? even amongst the people
coding the android app?

~~~
w1ntermute
It's like that in most of the Valley. You have (a) early adopters who jumped
on the iPhone train in 2007 and can't get off due to lock-in (apps,
familiarity), (b) high percentage of Mac users creating a halo effect, and (c)
hero-worship of Steve Jobs/Apple. This combines to make the percentage of
Android users in the Valley much lower than in the general population.

~~~
joshAg
huh. I never noticed that having android was so rare amongst techies in the
valley.

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tallanvor
Facebook is the most popular example of a bad app, but it's far from the only
one...

Try the Grindr app sometime. It'll kill your battery life like nothing else,
and it has some sort of blocking bug that interrupts music when it is
refreshing your location. --I haven't encountered any other app that does
that!

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Colliwinks
Facebook's mobile apps have to use the Facebook API, which is notoriously
terrible. Facebook have no reason to devote resources to this, as they don't
want third party implementations dragging people away from their ad revenue.

Similarly, their mobile app is capable of delivering far less ads than the web
page, so they'd rather people sat on that at their desk rather than browsing
on their phone.

In relation to lack of decent search and other obviously lacking elements:
They're always going to devote far more resources to things which directly or
indirectly improve advertising (graph search, friend finding, increasing
numbers of likes) rather than things that enhance user experience (since user
experience is far more tied to network size rather than feature set, compared
to other markets)

~~~
davedx
> Similarly, their mobile app is capable of delivering far less ads than the
> web page, so they'd rather people sat on that at their desk rather than
> browsing on their phone.

So basically their strategy for accelerating mobile usage is "don't support
mobile"?

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mrj
The amazing thing is how much memory the app can take up. Forget the UX
issues, it is urgent to fix the outrageous memory usage first. For example, my
old phone had just about 100M available for user apps.

Facebook uses about 121M. That's even after disabling all notifications and
clearing data. 121M is more than all the rest of my apps combined.

Google+ is also a relative heavyweight at 31M. Android's most used app, Google
Maps, uses a svelte 8.9M.

On older phones, just running Facebook alone will make the entire OS
experience slow and frustrating. Now with the latest update, it prompts me to
sync my contacts _every open_. It is shocking how badly they have managed
this.

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zanny
The Skype and Netflix apps are also awful custom homebrewed garbage. Netflix
constantly freezes and becomes unresponsive, and Skype doesn't background
itself anymore since the recent "Windows 8" overhaul on it. Also, why does
Netflix try to download every poster for every movie ever as soon as I open
it? I only have 300 KB/s internet, that takes forever!

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kamjam
First thing they need to do is to allow the app to be installed to the SD
card. The bloatware is now over 25mb in size, and I have a very limited size
internal memory on my phone, whereas have a bucket load of space on my SD.

And while we're on the subject, YouTube, GMaps and TweekDeck all need to allow
the same thing (every app should). I don't care about the lose of widgets
since I never use them. I forced them to SD using Titanium backup, but it's
not perfect and there are some glitches.

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fiendsan
It's pretty bloated and slow, no point using it! i dont need a 40+megs app
running all the time with full permissions on the background, makes no sense!
the facebook messenger is the same thing! and thats besides the need to
"access all my contacts", NO i want facebook contacts on facebook and phone
contacts on the phone for all the obvious reasons!

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brainsqueezer
I hate those buttons in the top-left corner of the screen that are used for
the main navigation. If you use two hands they are ok, but you know there are
people that still use phones only with one hand. There is no better place for
the main navigation that the top-left corner? Could any recommend a better
alternative? What about bottom-left?

~~~
snogglethorpe
I suppose the devs all have the latest 10" phones... ><

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taude
I actually don't think the new version of their app is that bad. Granted I
might not be a heavy user of the app, maybe 10 minutes/day, but the feed seems
a lot faster than it used to, and I like the ability to swipe through peoples
image galleries from the stream, without leaving that view.

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DominikR
The Facebook client is getting better, don't forget how bad it was 2 years
ago. I even created my own client for that reason. (Shameless plug:
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster>)

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flyinRyan
I removed the Facebook app from my iPhone when I heard about the Facebook
email scandal in the iOS 6 beta. I realized that they will just keep doing
this sort of thing so having their app on my phone was basically like having a
latent iPhone virus.

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Kiro
I think it's good. It's a bit laggy compared to the iPhone version but
otherwise it provides the functionality I need in a good way.

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alxeder
the most annoying thing in my opinion is, that fb doesn't clear my
notifications if I already seen those in another version e.g. website, tablet.
It's frustrating to see all these notifications over and over again.

~~~
bruceboughton
The iPhone version does. The worst offender in this regard is Twitter. I get
notifications of direct messages and mentions on (1) the website, (2) the
official app on my iPhone and (3) the official app on my iPad.

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Nursie
Why would I need a facebook app?

It's a web page and I have a browser....

~~~
nwh
Ill bite.

An app can provide notifications, integration and speed. An app can do a lot
more caching than the app, and will never have to reload a version of its own
code. There's places were apps are appropriate, and this is one of them.

~~~
Nursie
I understand some folks like to recieve fb message notifications as if they
were email I guess. Don't feel the need myself.

I guess I'm just questioning the need for an app for all things, when many of
the things are just as well served by a decent page in a browser.

~~~
kalleboo
Facebook is currently the best IM platform in terms of functionality,
stability and ubiquity. In that light, notifications are important.

~~~
nwh
They also have the best automatic presence detection, it's miles ahead of
iMessage in that (and almost every other) regard. I want to dislike it, but
Facebook has done a stellar job making their messaging system bullet-proof.

~~~
bookwormAT
I just downvoted you by accident, sorry. Maybe someone who really disagrees
with parent can vote him up instead? :-)

