How the Decision to Use HTML5 Stunted Facebook Mobile Growth

By Karla Robinson
September 4, 2012

Facebook doesn’t run a mobile operating system, thus it has no alliance to a specific platform. So when it was deciding how best to push apps to all devices, it opted for HTML5 over building numerous platform-specific apps.
“With that one decision — which makes sense when you think about the various pluses and minuses of the different options — it made its original Facebook app perhaps the most hated mobile app ever,” opines Eric Jackson of The Street.
Just as HTML “allowed one common language to proliferate” in the early days of the Web, “HTML5 and its advocates believed the same thing would happen in the mobile Internet,” the article explains.
“Mobile developers wouldn’t want to do all the work to build different versions of the same mobile apps. So they’d all opt for HTML5 as a programming language.”
But in Facebook’s case, the app turned out buggy and slow, often crashing. While HTML5 seemed like a good decision — and could be the best option in the future — it failed for Facebook in the present. And it took years to fix that mistake.
The post suggests the bad app not only frustrated users, but also caused the social giant to lose mobile momentum while its rival Twitter took off.

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