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0 pointstptacek13y ago0 comments

If it's so easy for Facebook to get a good mobile client out, why didn't they update the (much loathed) iOS client months and months ago? My suggested answer: it isn't in fact easy for them to do that. So time to market is an issue for them.

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flatline313y ago· 2 in thread

That's a catch 22, and none of it has to do with user experience.

- It's not easy because they have a historically web-centric organization.

- They have a web-centric organization because they had not invested in building a broader engineering team.

- They did not invest in building a broader engineering team because they have a web-centric organization, so they stuck with web technologies.

Their engineering management put appeasement of their existing web-centric engineering organization ahead of user-experience.

wicknicks13y ago

User experience is the not the only governing factor in software development. As the John Carmack post on HN front page says, software engineering is a social activity, which as you can imagine has more than one goal factor influencing it. I don't know what politics went on in this decision, but choosing a HTML/JS platform on mobile phones on definitely has its technical advantages. Though it doesn't apply to Facebook, a financial advantage would be to save money on hiring iOS experts/programmers.

flatline313y ago

As you noted, the financial advantage does not apply to Facebook. Contrarily, there's a financial advantage to shipping a better product, if you can afford to do so.

I'm interested in your supporting argument for other governing factors or software as a social activity, and how that relates to making engineering choices that sacrifice product quality for some notion of engineering perfectionism.

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