Facebook asks employees to switch to Android through “Droidfood” campaign

You all know it, and you’ve probably heard a lot of people say it, but I’m gonna be a bit pesky and say it again – the Facebook for Android is horrible, and it is a shame that such a big company can have an app that can be so irritating to use. It is slow, and has other problems such as timeout issues, battery drainage, etc.

However, we earlier heard that an improved Facebook app for Android would soon makes its way to the public, an app that would make use of the native Java language of Android instead of using HTML5, resulting in a fast app and hopefully without problems that currently plague it. Well, it seems that Facebook was taking that promise pretty seriously, as they have now started a dogfooding campaign for their employees, aptly called “droidfood”.

Facebook’s Menlo Park campus now has a series of posters plastered on the walls here and there, asking its employees to “switch today” to Android, with posters showing how Android is taking over the world and outpacing iOS, the OS which runs on most Facebook employees’ smartphone of choice (helped by the fact that the company earlier used to give out iPhones to all employees). Apparently, this has helped quite a lot, as many employees are now seen toting both iPhones and Android devices.

Another idea that Facebook has implemented is the “rage shake” feature, built into the internal betas that are tested by the employees, which allows them to file a bug report automatically by violently shaking their device. Quite a useful feature that will no doubt help in faster reporting of problems that the near 4000 beta testers at the company may face with the app.

The Facebook app is by all means a prime example of a poorly coded app, and while we often get a notification that we should install the “Facebook app for faster browsing” when we open the website on the browser, it is ironic that the browser is often much faster than the app itself. However, this campaign will no doubt help, especially as employees understand that making a poor app for the number one smartphone operating system in the world, running on more than three-quarters of all smartphones, isn’t nice, and will hopefully result in a better app very soon.

So keep your fingers crossed folks. Hopefully, we’ll soon see the official Facebook app not irritate and anger people and actually work properly. Till then, all you can do is use the browser, apps like Friendcaster, or just bear it out with the current state of the official app.

Source: Phone Arena

12 Comments

  1. Friendcaster became even worse within the last few months then the original FB app. I only recommend it for older devices, where FB app is so slow that its nearly unusable.

    1. It seems to work fine for me now. There were a couple of updates that caused problems, but it runs okay now. At least on my Galaxy Nexus.

  2. Are they actually developing the new app? They are really going slow on it. The native (non HTML5) iOS app went live like 3 months ago…

    1. Who knows what they’re doing? Hopefully it’s not just optimization they are working on instead of rebuilding the app.

  3. Friendcaster became even worse within the last few months then the original FB app. I only recommend it for older devices, where FB app is so slow that its nearly unusable.

    1. It seems to work fine for me now. There were a couple of updates that caused problems, but it runs okay now. At least on my Galaxy Nexus.

  4. Friendcaster became even worse within the last few months then the original FB app. I only recommend it for older devices, where FB app is so slow that its nearly unusable.

    1. It seems to work fine for me now. There were a couple of updates that caused problems, but it runs okay now. At least on my Galaxy Nexus.

  5. Are they actually developing the new app? They are really going slow on it. The native (non HTML5) iOS app went live like 3 months ago…

    1. Who knows what they’re doing? Hopefully it’s not just optimization they are working on instead of rebuilding the app.

  6. Are they actually developing the new app? They are really going slow on it. The native (non HTML5) iOS app went live like 3 months ago…

    1. Who knows what they’re doing? Hopefully it’s not just optimization they are working on instead of rebuilding the app.

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