Facebook for Android Will Go Native Soon

It feels like a lifetime ago when Facebook decided to build its mobile apps around a Web view. The idea was to keep the user interface consistent across all devices, and to allow Facebook to push changes out faster. Unfortunately, building a mobile app that just loaded a Web app wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Facebook’s mobile apps were slow, and many users — myself included — complained quite vocally about how bad an experience Facebook’s apps were.

A bit of relief came back in August, when Facebook re-launched its iOS app; a native app, built from the ground up for the iPhone and iPad. In fact, the move to native code was so good that Facebook 5.0 made our best of 2012 iOS apps list.  And good news for Android users, that same relief will soon come to Android.

Here’s a snippet from Facebook’s Engineering blog:

Today, we’re releasing a new version of Facebook for Android that’s been rebuilt in native code to improve speed and performance. To support the unique complexity of Facebook stories across devices, we’re moving from a hybrid native/webview to pure native code, allowing us to optimize the Facebook experience for faster loading, new user interfaces, disk cache, and so on.

The iOS app got substantially better after being rewritten as a native app, and Facebook’s Android app is almost certain to see some of the same improvements in speed and navigation. While Facebook may have erred with its original decision to develop its mobile apps in HTML 5, the fact that the company was willing to admit its mistakes, backtrack, and get to work on making its apps better is a sign that Facebook is ready to take mobile very seriously. As it should.

As of my last check (3:12 PM EST), the updated Facebook app is now live in the Google Play store. You can click that link to view the Web version of the store, or open it on your Android device.