Hey there!

I'm the Engineering Director at Facebook who's in charge of Android, so I'm going through this thread with some interest and taking notes for more stuff to look into. Being able to communicate with people who are consistently encountering an issue could be really helpful, so I might take the liberty of sending some people private messages to get more details.

Some of the things here sound like they might be issues between us and Google's C2DM service, which would not be unprecedented. It's pretty interesting that the BB thing solves it, though, and might point to us being able to work around it. A bunch of this stuff has been reworked thoroughly in the upcoming version to make it generally more reliable, though as with all code I'm sure there will be some new bugs as well.

As far as getting worse with every update, I certainly hope it's not the case. 1.8.2 and 1.8.3 were pretty much nothing but crash fixes, but we had users reporting that it got slower, got faster, used more memory, used less memory, etc. (With 1.8.3 they also reported that newsfeed stopped updating, which was true -- but it was true for all versions, because there was a brief server-side issue which also affected the www site.) 1.8.4 is especially interesting here: we saw the usual "it's broken"/"it's fixed" comments in the Android Market and elsewhere, but I have a secret: all that was in 1.8.4 was a change to a boolean variable that affects some diagnostics, and removal of the SMS permission (which was the point of the release). It's basically a null-hypothesis release, and the reaction points to a challenge we have in actually tracking user experience at scale.

I'm not trying to say "haha, you thought something changed, you idiot; our app is perfect!" -- causality and correlation are really fucking hard, and I am not denying the pain you feel. We don't want anyone to be angry about their Facebook experience, and certainly not this angry. Facebook should make you happy. That's the whole reason the team exists, and it's one of the biggest reasons people cite for joining the team.

Developing for Android is a challenge in a bunch of ways, from the wildly different devices to OEM/carrier OS customizations (oh, hello there changes to the webview at the center of our app) to figuring out where a problem is between our servers, the Google C2DM servers, and our apps. (We start with the assumption that it's in one of our pieces of code, but even if it is it can be hard to track down with some foreign matter in the middle.) That's not an excuse either, but it does mean that different users can have different experiences, and that it can be hard to chase them down effectively.

There are definitely ways that the app can be better. I hope that's always the case, or I'm out of a job, and I just got started here. We're investing a bunch in work to make things more faster, more robuster and generally more gooder, in addition to any feature work underway I can't say there is but I can't say there isn't hey look at the time. Other than their useless manager, the team gets up every day and bangs on this stuff because they want it to be great. We want people to be happy. We want everyone to agree that Facebook feels awesome when you use it from Android, and we're not there yet for everyone. (If you want to work on that too, we're definitely hiring Android folks.)

It is frustrating to see the app get updated and your bug not get fixed, no doubt. Somewhat ironically, the more often we try to deliver fixes to help some people, the more often others experience that frustration. I didn't have a good solution for that when I was working on Firefox, other than silent updates, and even if we could do that on Android I don't think I would want to.

(There are a bunch of theories in here about how the app is built and whether PYMK peeks at your contacts and so forth. I don't want to hijack this into an AMA, so I'm not going to answer them specifically. Also, the post-S-1 quiet period makes me afraid to wander off my turf.)

I don't know if that's helpful or interesting; there is a lot of stuff in here that is just venting, which is more than fine. You don't like something, you're on reddit, you shouldn't be shy about it. I just wanted to say that we hear it, and we aren't satisfied with it either, and we're working to make it better even with some strange things in our way. If you're interested in helping us learn more about your problem, that would be super-cool; send me a message or say so in a comment below or something and I'll figure out how to get people wired up.