Facebook: There's no magic wand for apps

Android and iPhone apps finally getting love they deserve
Android and iPhone apps finally getting love they deserve

Facebook's head of mobile has claimed that Android and other mobile platforms are now just as important as the iPhone to the social network.

Some consumers have claimed that Apple users always get access to the best Facebook Mobile features, like being the first to try out Places, but Henri Moissinac told TechRadar that it's simply a case of what works best for each platform:

"Of course, we want to deploy [all features] across all platforms at once, but in the past we've done things first on the iPhone and then tested to see what happens.

"Yesterday was the first time we launched two at once [new applications for the iPhone and Android], but we don't have a magic want to update all platforms at once; if you ask any developer trying to synchronise across all at once is very hard.

"It's not that the iPhone has all the best features, for instance you can't share directly from taking a picture or sync contacts to your address book - in that case Windows Phone 7 is best.

"But until we can get a much larger engineering team or a magic wand [there will always be disparity in places]."

Combined future

Moissinac also said that the desktop and mobile applications would always co-exist, although some users have migrated almost exclusively onto mobile:

"Comparing the mobile and web versions of the site, there are some users that are mobile only, or might only check on a PC ever six weeks or so.

"There has been some cannibalisation from the likes of iPhone or Android users, but when you look at the metrics both formats are still on the increase, so we see a world when the world is both web and mobile together."

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.