On Android and Facebook

After three months of false starts, teasing, last-minute cancellations that appear to have malice and forethought behind them, my Motorola Droid has finally been upgraded to Android 2.1.

The sad thing is, it still wasn't an "official" OTA update. Essentially, what I had to do was download the zip file containing the upgrade from Google's server, load it on a MicroSD card, and then boot from the card.

Verizon has never actually disclosed why it took them so long to make this available, but I suspect it is mostly their fault and not Google or Motorola's, as OTA updates were reported some time back in other parts of the world such as Hong Kong.

I couldn't find a way to increase the number of home screens in the new update. However, there's an app for that. It's called HelixLauncher. Now, my Droid does have more than three home screens. What's more, double-tapping the screen shows thumbnails of all of them, so I can skip across. This is just another beautiful aspect of the future, of the free world. That other fruity company would never allow things like this to happen unless you jailbreak.

Of course, there are some issues with Android that could be improved. As far as I am aware, there is still no way of taking a screenshot without rooting the system. And the Facebook app is embarrassingly terrible. It is lacking most of the features present on the iPhone version, such as inbox and chat, notifications never update (and I'm not exaggerating here, they never do unless you refresh manually. The only things that it fetches are friend requests, pokes, and messages), and things often simply don't work.

For instance, if someone posts on a group wall and it shows up in your feed, there is an option to comment/like it. However, this doesn't actually work. It just returns an error. Also, if there are more than two comments and you hit "view all," this also does not work.

Let's say someone posts some pictures, and you want to take a look. You tap on it, and it opens the Browser externally to redirect you to the Facebook Mobile website. We're talking m.facebook.com, not even touch.facebook.com. It's pathetic. However, if you go to the profile of the person that posted the photo, and click the "Photos" tab, the pictures can be viewed within the Facebook app. Whoever coded this should be shot.

In fact the Facebook app tries to redirect you to the Mobile website for just about anything. Want to see the comment someone posted on your wall post? Redirect. Want to see the comment someone posted on your photo? Redirect. Want to see the comment someone posted on a group wall post? Redirect. The last one is especially problematic because m.facebook.com doesn't even support groups. So it just comes back as "content not found."

At least the posted comment is displayed in the notifications page of the app, e.g. "X posted on your wall: 'ABCDEFG.'" However, if you want to respond to this, it will redirect you to the Mobile website. If it was a group post, you'll have to go to the Mobile site, and then direct yourself to the full desktop Facebook website, then navigate to the post.

I have a feeling that what Facebook is doing here is abusing the multi-tasking abilities of the Android system. The app that they have put out is a joke, and with today being April 1, perhaps they can come up with a useful, functional one, even if it's only for a day. At any rate, it's a joke that they didn't pull on the iPhone because they had to work around its limitations. What they've done on Android is say, "oh, well if it can run multiple apps at the same time, why don't we just make the Facebook app a collection of links to the Mobile website, which we already made three years ago? Then we wouldn't have to actually do any work designing an app for Android."