It's the iOS paradigm to make feature simple standalone apps. Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?
Many users upload photos to Facebook, so there's a huge incentive to make an app that makes it simple to do this. Even if the main Facebook app has feature parity with FBPhotos, it's still going to come with all of the cruft.
Two things people do that FB wants channeled through their systems: Photos & Chat.
Replacing your camera app with FBs means that all photos go to Facebook, which also represents the most important content on Facebook.
If your photos and your friends photos are all on FB then they go to FB.
If everyone you know is on FB then you'll probably use FB to talk to them. Thus, the chat ecosystem. Because FB is device and OS agnostic, it works even better than what Apple is trying to do with iMessage.
So why separate apps? Because people today already do these things as separate apps. You take a photo with your camera and then upload to FB. Now you just take a photo. This is actually what Google does with G+ and its automatic photo uploads. But FB can't do that, because they don't own the device ecosystem so this is their technique...for now.
Friends uploading all of their photos to Facebook,
Pros:
-Pictures of their girlfriends naked
Cons:
-A complete lack of relevance and editorial purview.
Every photo a user uploads to Facebook sends a message about who that person is. Out of about 300 photos I take on my iPhone, 1 makes it to Facebook. I have a few friends that upload lots of crap. For the most part, those friends had their feeds blocked by me fairly quick. These are not interchangeable events.
Facebook's biggest threat is a loss of meaning through noise, not users using an alternative app to capture their media.
As for Facebook Messenger, I'll be damned if I let Facebook permanently record every last one of my private message for eternity.
"Facebook's biggest threat is a loss of meaning through noise, not users using an alternative app to capture their media."
This is true of any data aggregator and visualizer. I'd argue they, probably next to Twitter, are the best at attempting to handle it within a social context.
I guess my thought about photos is incomplete in that making FB a storage for media means that your mean average of shared media will go up as well (it's already there, might as well). We see this in bulk uploads.
I agree that there is a certain amount of selectivity involved - but we vary as individuals. I think only in the last couple of years, after the fad of being able to toss everything online in heaps - have we begun to understood how our online perception is made.
"As for Facebook Messenger, I'll be damned if I let Facebook permanently record every last one of my private message for eternity."
TBH, I'm kind of surprised Apple is totally cool with this since one of the AppStore guidelines is to not create apps that replicate core iOS features. Now I know that Facebook's Camera app does more than take photos, but they are a direct replacement for the Camera and Photos apps that are native to iOS. Making the name and icon so very similar is close enough to be construed as an obvious intent to confuse/mislead.
I noticed that when changing the location settings in "Settings". The default Camera app was listed immediately next to Facebook Camera, confused me for a moment.
I wonder if Apple will make them add "Facebook" to the app name to avoid confusion, since it's the exact same name currently.
Not to veer too far from the main discussion, but 'git' isn't just some giant monolithic binary. The 'git' command is a wrapper around a bunch of different, relatively modular binaries. They each even have their own man page. (e.g. 'git push' maps to 'git-push'). Each is just a unique action that can be applied to a common data structure (the git repository).
Do an ls /usr/libexec/git-core/ (or your operating system's equivalent) some time. The fact that the porcelain exists does not mean that the plumbing does not.
Look closer at git, and you'll see that it's actually a collection of smaller programs (each of the git commands is made as a separate executable before being combined into git)
So when can we do $ camera | fb-photo | facebook | sed 4 | awk ?
Chaining the utilities is the crux of the Unix paradigm, remove that and you're left with individual utilities that are far less powerful than when chained together.
It's somewhat possible though not very widely used.
Basically, any iOS app can register a URL scheme and be opened with that scheme and anything after that by another app. This is used for example by Camera+: http://api.camerapl.us/app-api
With their API, another app can launch Camera+ to edit a photo and Camera+ sends the user back to the original app with the data of the edited photo.
Facebook uses it for single-sign-on of third-party app. (i.e. user taps "sign in with Facebook", the Facebook app is launched, the user taps "Accepts" and is redirected towards the original app)
One big limitation of this mechanism is that it's very much ad-hoc.
Another existing mechanism is the one where apps can register themselves as being able to handle a certain type of documents. You can then open a document from another app.
You can do it on iOS as well. You can go from the facebook camera app to the main fb app. (Any app can do this, but the point of the article is fb so i used them as the example)
Is the link between the two apps hardcoded on iOS?
On Android you can have any camera app | any photo editing/filters app | any social network upload where each app is chosen by the user which seems closer to the idea of pipes to me.
in fb camera, if you see someone is tagged, and you tap their name, it switches to the main fb app and shows their profile there. The notion of doing one thing well seems to be preserved.
"Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?"
I'd say that in any case, they had to have Contacts and Photo Album apps for the iPod Touch and iPad.
Why also include them on the iPhone? Well, Photo Album has more features than the Camera app (access to Events, Faces…) so it might be simpler to have one codebase for a Photo Album app shared with iPod Touch and iPad, rather than trying to put all the features of Photo Album in the Camera app. For me, it's better too because it makes the Camera app more easily replaceable. (as seen with the OP)
For the Contacts app, I'm not entirely sure since it seems to be a clear subset of the Phone app.
but what's weird is that the Facebook app also does both of these things already, just not quite as well. It's especially weird with Messenger because I think both apps can get push notifications.
If I were Facebook, I would be thrilled at the idea. I'd want as many apps as Facebook has features, as long as we could get users to install them.
Right now "Facebook" is one app on iPhones and Androids, next to native apps like Camera and Photos. Imagine if Facebook was 10 or 15 apps, and they were the same across iOS and Android. For the Facebook-loving crowd, at least, they'd take up your entire home screen, and make the OS virtually irrelevant. For these people, it's more like anti-fragmentation (unification), on Facebook's platform.
I see this as similar to Netscape (built for a dozen platforms), or Office (for Mac): they're saying "don't worry about the OS -- we'll take care of that for you -- you only need to know that if Our Product is on top, then you know how to use it".
Agree with this statement. To compete with Microsoft, Apple, Google you need a platform (OS and phone). While Facebook messenger didn't really off, photos may be more of a popular transition as many send photos to Facebook anyway.
My experience with their app is that it's just so slow that being able to jump directly to Messenger when I need to use it saves me some time. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing.
Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.
Because they optimise a particular use case, which makes it more likely people will do something, which will make it more likely that facebook can use the shared content to drive more people towards facebook.
Take photo sharing. Photos are often spontaneous. So the more responsive, quick and simple it is to take a photo and share it the more likely it is to happen. Ideally I want to hit the photo app and by the time I've moved the camera up to my face be ready to take a photo. Facebook's new app is much closer to that experience than their current generic app. I bet that it will get more photos on Facebook. More photos == more traffic == more dollars.
You can't fix the current generic Facebook app to work as a better photo taking app - since if you made it the ideal photo taking application, it would be sub-optimal at the other things that facebook want the mobile app to do.
For photos specifically, it takes me an average of 10 minutes to upload a photo on their iPhone app if I'm on my cell connection. The 10 minutes consists of a combination of upload attempts, fails, freezes, etc. It's just a horrible experience.
If this new standalone photo app will let me easily, quickly, flawlessly upload photos to Facebook, then hell yeah.
The main app is optimized for reading your timeline. Fetches notifications, friends, messages etc.
It is hard to optimize for different tasks at once, while I'd also argue it would be possible to strike a good balance. But I think it is a pragmatic decision rather than try to achieve that perfect balance, and let several instagrams take over, do the right thing for each task and a year down the line knowing usage patterns, with much better hardware, you can think about a consolidated app.
I completely agree. Facebook's iPhone app experience is overall horrible in my experience. It just simply rarely works.
I think they should fix it. But if their current solution is to make the photo taking/sharing a separate app, that's fine with me. I use Facebook mobile more to take/share photos than anything else on Facebook.
They started off with that approach, the app had a pseudo home screen with quick access to different functions.
Ultimately I think it boils down to what you think of when you want to do take a photo or send a message which maps to (Facebook Camera, Facebook Messenger) more naturally than just Facebook.
The same reason that one goes to "Camera" on an iPhone to take photos and goes to "Messages" on an iPhone to send messages. They do different things and it's clear when you open the app what you want to do. And though you can take photos from within Messages and can SMS photos from within Camera, it keeps things simple to have a clear intention for each app.
When you try to design a mobile app you quickly realize how little real-estate you have on a phone to build a complex interface. Facebook is a ridiculously complex app when you think about all of the things you can do.
Facebook might be working under the assumption that they can make cleaner, simpler products by breaking them out into smaller functional units all backed by the same social graph.
Or this could be a relic of something the Sofa team was working on before the Instagram deal.
> Or this could be a relic of something the Sofa team was working on before the Instagram deal.
Probably. And the Instagram deal is still under review from the FTC for quite some time, so it'll be awhile before we see any major integrations, I think.
When taking photos, Facebook wants it to be the first thing users think of. By stripping other separate features, users won't be that easily confused about the purpose of the app. I'd venture and say few users immediately go to the current Facebook to upload a photo, but if there is a separate app, then the other features won't distract them from what they want to achieve. Basically: "Want to share a moment? Think Facebook. NOT twitter. NOT instagram."
Icon space. Assuming most people don't put their related apps in folders, they instead have it all on display. Like shelf space at the grocery store. The more product users can see with your brand, the more they'll
1) Trust the brand
2) Use it
I'm sure if they haven't integrated them yet, they will; and that in itself is a kind of lock-in you could only otherwise get if you owned the OS.
I like it. There's less wading through non-native in-app menus. I want to read my timeline or generally waste time? Facebook. I want to send a quick message to someone I don't text? Facebook Messenger. I want to share a new photo or three from my friend's commencement? Facebook Photos.
One tap and I'm there, and ready to do what I want to do. Maybe two, if I have the app in a folder.
I agree, at this point, my iPhone needs a new folder created specifically created for Facebook produced apps. I already have too many camera apps installed, many of which upload to Facebook.
I understand Facebook trying to keep users in their ecosystem, but separate apps for each part of their service seems a bit much to me as well and I don't see how it's a good long term strategy if they continue this cycle. We'll know they don't really have a strategy if they release an app solely for rejecting requests to play Words with Friends and Draw Something with others.
Can the point of separate apps be justified in reinforcing that Facebook is more of a platform than just a website?
They also have Pages & Messenger. I like the idea of isolating these aspects because it gives more utility to these individual functions rather than obscuring them by combining all of the site's functionality into one, slow and poor performing app.
Overall, the app looks good but I'm not sure what's the deal with Instagram now.
I had the Facebook app for Android before they split it into 3. The version just before the split was unstable for uploading photos. It was consistently crashing whenever I tried to upload a photo.
I'm not sure what was the source of the crash, but I can see how breaking up the Facebook application into smaller pieces would make it easier for devs to maintain well.
I think it makes sense to have two apps for FB. One's for content creation, and optimized for that. The other's for when you're bored and killing time scanning through the stream. When I'm sitting somewhere and I see something I want to share, it makes sense to just use the app that's optimized for posting a photo
Facebook always had photo sharing features built into their apps, but was still dominated by Instagram. Lesson here is that mobile apps are very task oriented - people have apps to check their email, get directions, etc. Having function specific apps for Facebook makes sense here.
I actually asked myself this question several times until I recently found an answer.
They want to compete with what's app and bbm. Facebook messenger is the SMS application of people who have internet on their phone. It's actually brilliant when you think about it!
They want to own the mobile ecosystem. After they release enough Facebook _____ apps, they can (a) lean on the OS makers to give them preferential treatment, ala Twitter in iOS, and/or (b) release a Facebook phone with "all the apps you already know and love".
I think this might have something to do with the App Center they are launching soon. Making people install their own apps through the app center will make them more familiar with it.
Because it ropes in people like me who don't want the native Facebook app on their phone, but want to keep in touch with friends who use Facebook messages.
Many users upload photos to Facebook, so there's a huge incentive to make an app that makes it simple to do this. Even if the main Facebook app has feature parity with FBPhotos, it's still going to come with all of the cruft.