> It is the most popular free iphone app. That wouldn't be the case if it weren't well made.
I believe iFart was fairly popular for a time (where popular is defined as "downloaded many times"), and it even cost money, putting a financial barrier to entry in front of potential users. Does that make iFart a well-made app though? I don't think so (though maybe you or others do).
I think the Facebook app's popularity just comes from the popularity of Facebook the service.
I use the facebook iPhone app quite a lot, and I don't like it either, so I'll take a stab at it.
I never know what I'm looking at. The array of controls changes every time you move from one screen to the next, so I'm never sure where I am.
And that button up in the right hand corner, the one that usually says "News Feed?" Say I'm trying to switch to something else, but all of a sudden the selector control stops working, because the app is busy trying to prefetch stuff for some selector option I didn't plan on choosing, I just stopped on that one temporarily. Then, when the control becomes responsive again, it's impossible not to overshoot, because now it's processing a bunch of user interface events that happened while it was ignoring me.
Maybe part of the problem is that facebook itself is confusing. I don't really have any idea what the difference between "News Feed" and "Status Updates" is, and I'm not terribly interested in finding out, because the site will probably change to something else altogether in a month or two.
Yeah, I have to admit, I just don't like facebook very much either. But everybody I know is there, and it's pretty, so here we are.
