Facebook iPad App Ready Since May – Engineer Who Built It Quits In Frustration

The drama around the Facebook app for iPad has been going on for months now with the Apple device launched over 18 months ago and still no sign of the app. It was leaked on Techcrunch a couple of months ago and many expected it to be released at the F8 conference last week but that date came and went without any major mobile announcements. Today though the engineer who has been working on the app for the last year has posted a blog post claiming that he has quit Facebook as a result in the delay in releasing the app. Here is what he has to say…

After the app reached feature completion in May and I was told that it was going to be delayed yet again, I stopped working on the project entirely. A few weeks later I decided to focus my energy on the Nimbus project.

It is now nearly 5 months since the app was feature complete and I haven’t seen it released except for when the project was leaked on Techcrunch. 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.

I learned a lot during my time at Facebook. Facebook is truly an exciting place to work at and I am sad that my experience there was less than ideal. I had the great privilege of working closely with some of the best designers in the industry and shadowing David Recordon as we looked into the possibility of me working on their open source team. I spent a significant amount of time thinking about what I wanted to do and decided in the end that I needed to switch things up and step away from Facebook.

The most interesting part of this is that he is off to work at Google shifting the trend of Google staff leaving to work at Facebook. The iPad app situation seems to show that relations between Apple and Facebook are very frayed at best as Facebook evolves in to a media platform. At the end of the day it’s the users who are hurting here as we all want to experience Facebook on the iPad. With this sort of info leaking out you really do have to wonder now if there will ever be a Facebook app for iPad. Very strange indeed.
Image credit Techcrunch