Facebook iPhone app

A few months ago a revised version of the Facebook app for iPhone was released to rapturous applause. Even from me. No one could believe how god awful the previous versions were in comparison, and it set a new standard for social network-ish apps on the store.

Well, a few months later and lots of playing around I have a story to tell, about why to not get this app. Let me begin by saying that I have an iPhone 3G, factory unlocked (so I never have to hack the baseband to use different sim cards, etc.) and using official software.

About 2 months ago I decided it’d be nice to record video on my iPhone. Since I don’t have a 3G[S], and don’t really see the need for one (from my perspective), I decided to jailbreak my phone. It doesn’t need to be unlocked, so going back to “normal” firmware will never be an issue here. So I downloaded a few apps from Cydia, did a bit of messing with customised backgrounds and themes as well as download qik and recorder.

I downloaded a neat little app that’s moderately useless on a 3G. It allows you to load two apps at the same time, so effectively you can have one app running in the background. With limited memory available on the phone, it was never going to work consistently. Games would kill the app, crashing all apps together. It worked well with Wunder Radio and Tweetie, for example. However it slowed down my phone quite a bit, as every app opened it had to allocate memory quite specifically for, often causing massive slow down. Annoying when playing a game or using the dictionary function.

I deleted the app and things sped up again, but not back to “normal” speeds. Sliding to unlock took at least 3 seconds (an eternity by phone standards) which affected how fast I could answer calls and the like.

So eventually Apple released new firmware and I upgraded to it, realising that I used Qik twice and never recorded anything. Thus deleting all my cydia apps. The speed still wasn’t up to scratch. I decided to restart my phone and instead of doing a nice quick restart, the phone hung on the Apple logo on boot-time. The only way to get it back to the desktop was to plug it into iTunes.

For the last few weeks I’ve just “put up” with this issue until last night I bought Earthworm Jim, which had huge issues with loading, playing music and stagnating in the middle of a game. This game shouldn’t have any technical problems – it’s simple, and based on old code that runs on nearly any old piece of crap system.

So, out of frustration I looked up the problem with the 3G. I found a lot of people with the same issue, often linked to firmware. The advice is to restore the phone, but even then, once apps are restored from backup problems crop up again. Until someone figured it out by doing what I call a “beep test”.

In computer hardware, when fixing something, when you re-assemble hardware components you never build the PC and start it. You attach everything to the motherboard one-by-one, each time turning the machine on. When the PC starts up it’ll have errors in the form of timed-beeps which will tell you something about the hardware. So for example, you’ll stick the CPU in first and it’ll give an error about having no RAM, etc.

So, applying the same logic, someone restored their iPhone (again) and one-by-one installed their favourite apps (all legitimate from the app store, like mine). Typically, the problem came at the last hurdle. Facebook.

Somehow, the Facebook app does not like the current firmware on iPhone’s, and causes it to run dog slow, all of the time. The “Settings” tab for it doesn’t have anything special inside it. Everything’s arbitrary. No push notifications or anything. Why is it hogging memory, even when not used?

What’s worse is you can’t just delete the app. Once you do that, all other apps crash when they start up (except the ones that came with the phone, iCal, Calc, Notes, etc.) which means syncing with iTunes – again.

Suffice to say my phone works a charm now. It’s important, however, to note that this is not something that happens to everyone – and no one really knows why. It’s not related to factory unlocked phones, ones previously jailbroken or special model runs. Nope… no idea. I didn’t even use it that much!

Anyway, this long-winded lecture-like blog post was a nice story – but with a message for iPhone users, be careful with some apps…