This isn't a trade-off Facebook needed to make. Whether it's a trade-off your organization needs to make depends on your resource availability, skills, and target market. However, there's no value in dressing up the trade-off as anything other than a trade-off.
The target market and product factors into the question of resource allocation. Nest would not have made such a splash if they decided to skip user experience and focus on fast feature roll-out, and Dropbox would not have succeeded to nearly the same degree (if at all) without first-rate native user experience.
You're making a case for why Dropbox didn't have to go through the time-to-market-driven experimentation Facebook did. That is indeed an advantage to being Dropbox. It isn't a very good indictment of Facebook's strategy.
It's not as if mobile was unproven at the time they decided to switch away from their native mobile client.
- It's not easy because they have a historically web-centric organization.
- They have a web-centric organization because they had not invested in building a broader engineering team.
- They did not invest in building a broader engineering team because they have a web-centric organization, so they stuck with web technologies.
Their engineering management put appeasement of their existing web-centric engineering organization ahead of user-experience.
I'm interested in your supporting argument for other governing factors or software as a social activity, and how that relates to making engineering choices that sacrifice product quality for some notion of engineering perfectionism.
- Facebook fails to deliver features through the superior approach ...
- ... but does deliver them through a lesser approach ...
.. then the mechanism they use to deliver the features provides a better user experience, because it has the features, thus justifying the choice to deliver them in the through a subpar mechanism?
That's ... circular. Painfully so.
It would be better for the user experience if they delivered features with the highest level of quality they're capable of providing, and that's demonstrably not inside of a UIWebView.
Sorry, but how do you know this? Also, politics in of itself is rarely the real reason why decisions are made. Someone who seeks to gain benefit by making decision (which is deemed therefore political) can certainly be a reason. So, I'd be curious as to what benefit some individual or individuals sought to gain by making this decision.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/redux_how_facebook_mobi...
> It's not difficult to determine
I'm really curious as to who benefits from this internally at FB? Seriously, I'm having a hard time determining who?
Pretend that Facebook's hitherto web-centric engineering team is external to Facebook -- they're a consultancy. Now imagine Facebook comes to them and says: We want a mobile application. Who benefits if they manage to convince Facebook to pay for them to produce a web application?
Let's reel it back to reality. How do people inside an organization benefit if they expand their area of purview, responsibility, and increase their value to the organization? Likewise, what power dynamics come into play when a new, potentially distinct engineering team garners additional purview, responsibility, outside of your domain, skills, or control?
That is correct in theory, but falls on the face with facebook and others. Unless you literally just mean "more features", and not improving what they're making. E.g. paying for promoted updates so friends see them in their cluttered stream surely is Yet Another Feature, but is it good? I guess it depends on who the market is, here..
If the thing were written in spaghetti code, it would at least mean people would have some time to think in between, or even manage to get out of their 20s before their redefine how grandma keeps in touch.
Still, I'm happy that they improved how their crappy soulless product runs on another crappy soulless product, it keeps them off the street.