Facebook to Revamp Its App Following Significant Criticism

You don’t make it to 750 million friends without a few critics. Thankfully for Facebook, those critics are only expressing negativity over a buggy iPhone app. Over 65% of reviews on the App Store for the Facebook app are unanimously unfavorable, rating the app one stars out of a possible five. The other 35% are not all that enthusiastic either, with only about 15% awarding the app five stars. After three years of updates providing minor improvements, the current version has an average rating of two stars. Ouch.

The main reasons for the backlash users have been citing are for issues with data being retained between updates, crashes, and most importantly how messages and notifications randomly fail to appear. Through my (admittedly too often, but who is not addicted to Facebook?) usage of the app, I can attest to the latter three being real annoyances.

With Facebook’s recent plans of bringing the social networking service to 2,500 feature (read: dumb as opposed to smart) phones coming to fruition a little over a week ago with the “Facebook for Every Phone” Java app, there has been a growing dedication to making Facebook accessible on every device. But with 750 million people using the latest-and-greatest version of what started out as The Face Book in a Harvard dorm room, who can blame them?

Spokesman Derick Mains is aware of the criticism and bugs users are experiencing, promising a “new app” in the near future. He refuted claims that Facebook has been “neglecting” it, saying that they “are fully committed to offering our iPhone users the best possible Facebook experience and have been innovating on the platform since its launch four years ago.”

Tens of millions of people will be happy about the better-optimized, less problematic iPhone app since there are currently a staggering 84 million active users. It does not take more than a guess to realize that Facebook is easily one of the most popular apps and certainly manages to keep users compelled to check it daily more so than most others.

We couldn’t imagine Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg anywhere else but staring at iTunes refreshing the reviews once the new update is released a la The Social Network.

[partially via onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/facebook-users-give-iphone-app-thumbs-down.html');" target="_blank" href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/facebook-users-give-iphone-app-thumbs-down.html">Los Angeles Times]