One year, six months, and seven days after the iPad first went on sale, Facebook has at last released its app for Apple's tablet.
"Many of you have been asking about Facebook for iPad," the company said in an understated blog post Monday. "Today, it's finally here."
The long-delayed app has the subject of much Silicon Valley chatter. Some rumors suggested that a rift between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple's AAPL, Fortune 500) executive team over Apple's Ping social network was to blame for the delay. Others claimed that Facebook preferred a Web-based application that bypassed Apple's strict app store rules.
Former Facebook developer Jeff Verkoeyen, the lead engineer on the the iPad app, wrote on his blog recently that he quit the company after Facebook continually delayed the release of the iPad app. It had been in the works since October 2010 and was essentially completed in May, Verkoeyen said.
"For reasons I won't go into details on the app was repeatedly delayed throughout the summer," Verkoeyen wrote. "Needless to say this was a frustrating experience for me. The experience of working on this app was a large contribution to the reasons why I left Facebook, though that doesn't mean it wasn't a difficult decision."
If Verkoeyen's timeline is correct, that means that the Facebook iPad app was stuck in limbo longer than the Apple's notoriously delayed white iPhone 4.
No comments:
Post a Comment