I didn't make it out to be simple or complicated. They valued their sense of developer efficiency over user experience.
By going native, Facebook has greatly improved the user experience of this version of their app (which I applaud), but greatly slowed the speed at which they can iterate to the next version.
Sacrificing their user experience for rapid updates is putting a sense of engineering efficiency ahead of user experience.
Or more likely, consider an example where Facebook is not sure which of 3 UI changes would most improve the user experience, and they want to serve each of the 3 to small subsets to collect test data. Native UI rendering takes away this ability, potentially reducing Facebook's ability to improve the user experience--also a form of sacrifice.
Now maybe you believe that the poor performance of the HTML5 UI was an even greater sacrifice than these, and thus the switch to the native UI is a net improvement in user experience. I happen to agree with that, but that doesn't mean there aren't tradeoffs.
Performance issues aside, the user experience of the Facebook mobile app is miles better now than it was when they last rendered the iOS UI natively. A big reason for that is the speed at which they iterate changes in the HTML5 UI.
Edit to add TL;DR: There is more to optimizing the user experience than maximizing UI performance.
"They valued their sense of developer efficiency over user experience"
No, they made a judgement that user experience would ultimately be better from being able to deploy rapid changes via a consistent cross platform experience under their control vs writing OS specific code and placing themselves under the control of a third party and that will significantly operationally limit them ("Can we roll out the new user profile yet? No, we're still waiting on Apple to approve the change ...").
They may have been wrong, but it doesn't change their original intent. If anything we should all be lamenting the failure of HTML5 as a truly viable app replacement at this point; I can't blame Facebook for wanting to believe it would be possible.
In my experience, users want a consistent platform experience -- one that fits in with the platform that they're using. They're also not interested in your development processes, especially if it means rapid dispatch of potentially breaking changes. In fact, I'd say that runs counter to user's interests.
Engineers and product managers seem to be the primary cheerleaders of "consistent cross platform experience". I don't see why a user would want that. I do see why developers and product managers would want that.
> If anything we should all be lamenting the failure of HTML5 as a truly viable app replacement at this point; I can't blame Facebook for wanting to believe it would be possible.
I'm not lamenting HTML5 as a viable application platform replacement, because it never was going to be one. The web industry consistently ignores 30+ years of experience that the desktop (and now mobile) development industries have in bringing high quality applications to user's devices. The web universe eschews common platform conventions, common rendering approaches, common widget libraries, and instead has attempted to force everyone to individually reinvent application development on top of DOM, CSS, and JavaScript -- a SGML-derived history-laden mess that served documents well and applications poorly.
The lesson for the web industry should be that they need to figure out how to bring align whatever ethos they have -- presumably of a common, open platform -- and bring them to bear on implementing something genuinely competitive with the native development platforms.
DOM/CSS/JS is not it.
It's not about me; your statement was about what Facebook's values were (valuing their own expediency over their users). I just don't think your statement about their values was fair, especially in the light of history (do you remember Steve Jobs walking out on stage and telling everybody how the iPhone didn't need apps because the browser was so awesome?).
> In my experience, users want a consistent platform experience -- one that fits in with the platform that they're using
Well we're not that far apart then. You consider iOS the platform, I consider Facebook the platform. You can hardly blame Facebook for considering Facebook to be the platform.
I general I don't think there's a single answer to this. If lots of new features delivered rapidly are what your users need then it seems obvious that only writing code once and delivering it to lots of platforms can get them those features fast. If features are slowing and quality of experience is more important then native code is a better option. I'd posit that Facebook is actually transitioning from it's rapid-development-new-feature phase into a more mature, stable platform where quality of experience is more important, and this transition is just natural and even optimal for them rather than the kind of "mistake corrected" that people are making it out to be.
There's not much room for "simply" when you're talking about a service that has to work across dozens of OS/browser variants, is practically a utility to its (hundreds of millions of) users, and receives multiple daily updates. This isn't an upstart web service that can optimize around a platform that might be only a fraction of their potential user base either.
