In addition to completely rebuilding its iOS app from the ground up, Facebook has rolled out a number of significant new tools and tweaks to improve the social networking experience on iPhones.
For starters, Facebook has updated Facebook Camera, the standalone photo-sharing app. Best of all, the 1.1 refreshed version of Facebook Camera delivers album support – a widely requested feature.
Facebook users can now create and modify Facebook albums while in the Camera app.
“We want people to tell stories in littler clumps,” Scott Raymond, an engineer for Facebook Camera tells Wired. “It’s more natural and it’s more suited for mobile. But Albums has been part of the Facebook Photos product for years and users love them and there’s plenty of valid use cases for it. The Album [support] illustrates that we’re constantly listening to user feedback.”
Just last week, Facebook updated its main iOS app to address the speed issues that have plagued it in the past. Facebook scrapped all of the app’s old web-based code for a more efficient native code base, resulting in an app that works twice as fast. The main app also ported some of the code that the Facebook Camera team had developed in order to make photo uploads speedier.
“The lessons that we learned here are in the Facebook app now,” Raymond added. “That’s another interesting thing about this kind of approach we have of multiple mobile apps. We are constantly learning from one another and figuring out what works and moving it from platform to platform.”
