Instagram safe for now

Mike Schroepfer of Facebook:

As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can’t wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience.

So it looks like Facebook will not swallow Instagram, but instead let it continue to thrive.  This is probably a good move, no reason to piss off a bunch of Instagram users that are probably Facebook users already.  It’s pretty clear that Facebook really wanted to go after Instagram team for their talents in mobile, not buy more Facebook users.

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Facebook, iOS

Facebook iOS app overhaul to be built by former Apple employees?

About a month ago New York Times Bits heard rumors that Facebook was working on a completely new, real iOS app. Not just an app pulling in HTML5 webpages through an app frontend. The rumor is now heating up, according to a report by Value Walk:

According to sources, Facebook Inc has hired a team of former Apple Inc. employees to completely redesign the Facebook iPhone app. These sources say, the app will get a “major code overhaul” rather than the normal update.

I was happy that Facebook was updating their app, but if this report is true, it’s even better than I thought. Who better to fix this broken app than former Apple employees?

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Facebook, iOS, iOS apps, Speculation

Facebook to update iOS app, faster, less buggy

New York Times Bits:

According to two Facebook engineers who asked not be named because they are not authorized to speak about unreleased products, Facebook has completely rebuilt its iOS application to optimize for one thing: speed.

Not official yet, but the makes sense considering Facebook trying to prove it can flourish in the mobile environment. Basically the current app is just a HTML 5 web app inside of a iOS app shell. If this changes to a true native iOS app, this will definitely improve speed, but should fix a lot of other headaches and bugs we’ve all had using this app.

Follow me on Twitter @justin_horn

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Facebook, iOS apps

Facebook iPad app should, finally, be out today! (Updated)

UPDATE From 9to5Mac here is an official page about the iPad app

UPDATE 2 Official blog post with announcement is live (via @atul)

UPDATE 3 It’s out, go get it!

The Verge (This Is My Next):

 After lots of rumored drama and supposed delays, Facebook is finally (and we mean finally!) rolling out Facebook for iPad. And surprisingly, it looks almost identical to the version we saw leaked out back in July with a nice two-pane view and strong resemblance to the iPhone app.

Apparently it doesn’t contain the latest Timeline views, but it’s a start.

The Verge also reporting about some nice updates for the iPhone app:

But that’s not all that’s new today — Facebook is updating its iPhone app with bookmarks to apps, a new Requests dialog that will display app notifications, and support for Facebook Credits for in-app payments.

I still don’t see this live on the store, but be sure to follow us on Twitter and we’ll let you know when we do!

From the official Facebook page about the new app:

A New Way to Experience Facebook

Follow me on Twitter @justin_horn

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Facebook, iOS apps, iPad