Facebook Needs To Get Its Android Act Together

We’ve been patient. Really, we have. Android users know our platform started up as a tiny upstart fighting the Apple juggernaut. We know many of the apps in our market are of lower quality than their counterparts in the App Store. We even know that Google and Facebook are in fierce competition in a lot of areas. But seriously, can we have a decent Facebook app already?

It took forever for notifications to come to Android devices at all, and they’ve never worked properly. Facebook Chat supposedly works on the app, but I keep Trillian installed specifically because it never has. I don’t get 90 percent of my messages, and even when chats come through, there’s no telling whether the app will work the whole way through a conversation or if it will suddenly tell me that my friend is offline.

This week, I got fed up with my occasional Facebook notifications and shut them off entirely. I figured that after I had a third-party solution, they were just annoyances. And what happened when I turned off notifications? Chat started working! The only time I’ve ever gotten a whole conversation’s worth of chat notifications was when I wasn’t supposed to be getting notifications at all. I had to separately log out of chat to turn that off. Of course, it was only chat. No other notifications were working.

Then there’s the update issue. I have to ask, what developer can possibly think this is an acceptable result to an update?

We’re not talking obscure phones having weird reactions to a perfectly good update. I saw this result on the Droid 2, not exactly an uncommon device. And that wasn’t even a market update that you could say no to if you heard about the issue in time. That was a change to the in-app content, pushed out directly by Facebook, without the App Market.

Then there’s tablets. Bad enough Facebook hasn’t come up with a tablet-specific version of their Android app. I guess that’s forgivable just on the basis that they didn’t develop one for any tablet platform (the Touchpad Facebook app was designed by HP). But did they really have to block the phone version of the app from working on larger devices? I can’t see that serving any purpose other than inconveniencing users. I’m just glad third party developers are trying hard to fill the gap.

It’s not even like Facebook refuses to take Android seriously as a platform. They’ve gone to the trouble of having HTC create an Android Facebook phone, with a dedicated hardware button. You’d think along the way they could do some work on the app that the button launches.

This is the number one smartphone OS by market share at this point. And Facebook isn’t selling their app, so there are no excuses about the App Store generating more money than the App Market. These failures are inexcusable. Get your act together, Facebook.