Facebook says it again: We are mobile
The social network wants to make sure you know it's paying attention to its mobile apps.
Facebook really wants people to know that it's got its mind on mobile.
The company put out a blog post today detailing the work of its product teams since its mobile first transformation. Wall Street has been highly critical of Facebook in the past for not paying attention to mobile, which is where many users have moved.
But now, Facebook says, it's all about mobile. The company has been updating its main Facebook app frequently, and paying attention to standalone apps is key to that process, Product Manager Michael Eyal Sharon wrote in the post. He used the example of the update released earlier this week that integrated Camera and Messenger features into the main app.
"Having mobile apps designed for the most popular mobile activities allows us to take the best features from each and cross-pollinate with our core Facebook for iOS and Android apps," he wrote. "However, this also introduces the challenge of deciding which features make the most sense for the core apps and figuring out how to implement them."
Sharon said the solution has involved retooling the development process. In the last year, Facebook has been making the switch from a focus on desktop to a focus on mobile by making every engineer a mobile developer. This means engineers on the Camera team or the Messenger team are responsible for creating apps for both desktop and mobile. In the past, Facebook had one small mobile team dedicated to the main app.
The main app, was known to be painfully slow, so Facebook has been shipping out updates often in hopes of improving the experience.
"Having a single team own the product experience in their standalone apps as well as the integrated experience in the core app means that we have more thoughtfully executed experiences across platforms and applications," Sharon wrote.
His post is not just about patting Facebook's engineers on the back. The company is sticking to its messaging -- mobile, mobile, mobile -- to let its 600 million mobile users know that they come first. And, to remind Wall Street that the company finally has a mobile strategy.