Facebook's New iOS Faster, Easier

Facebook's upgrade on iOS is (as advertised) rather astonishingly fast -- loading and scrolling and photos.

Mobile Facebook on iOS just got better, with a super-quick refresh rate, allowing for a "twice-as-fast" experience for users, just like the Facebook blog announced.

After upgrading, the scrolling and the photo views were almost instantaneous.

The scrolling is smooth -- a differentiator from Google+ iOS app that has an intentional pause-and-postcard effect.

Another new feature is the banner at the top updates with the amount of new stories that have been fed to you. Just tap and the new ones appear. (Not a huge deal, but a step better than having to pull down to refresh.)

Once you've perused (or skimmed) the new stories, a one-tap will take you back to your news feed.

The dev team is already looking at the next iteration, too, using its HTML 5 and Objective C expertise:

To solve (the constant evolution of the app), we came up with a different plan to let you use the newest features without requiring you to update the entire app: a "fallback" renderer. When the news feed team designs a new type of story, Facebook for iOS downloads something it doesn't quite understand. When we detect this, we use a "fallback" renderer to show the pertinent information in the new story in a format the app already understands. In the meantime, we create a new custom renderer and have it ready for our next app update.

A less-jarring experience than the mobile equivalent of a 404.

The Android app also got updated Thursday with an integration with Google Play. The app now lets users create and share events and has a much-improved photo sharing via upload experience.

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