Facebook Launches iOS App Redesign

Facebook announced a completely redesigned iOS app today. According to their latest press release: “The Facebook 5.0 app is twice as fast as the previous version when launching the app, scrolling through news feed and opening photos in feed.” In my testing I can confirm that the app performs much faster than the previous app. The overall feel is much more refined as well without the jitter that the previous app was derided for. The performance gains were due to the developers completely scrapping the HTML5 based app and rewriting it using the native Objective C programming language. This is just more proof that the holy grail of write once, run anywhere that HTML5 promised has yet to take place for complex mobile apps.