How some coincidences make you smile.
Well, we all have some coincidences in our life that we smile about, especially when it is obvious that what happened is not really related to you, but it really seems that way for a split of a second.
On the 15th of July I’ve talked with some engineers from Facebook during an interview (who were developing the Android app) about some boring use-cases I had when using the app.
- The link nightmare
Everytime I clicked a link on Facebook for Android it opened on the default browser, (Chrome)… all went well, until I tried to return to Facebook…
If you are an Android user you probably have noticed that Chrome uses a LOT of memory, which makes most of the background apps die.
This is not a problem for most of the use-cases because it’s probably to optimize your experience on the browser, but when using Facebook it would really bore me, as when I returned to the app, it (re)started and was nowhere near the place where I was on my news feed… in fact the news feed was entirely different…
That made me start to avoid opening links on Facebook when using it in my Android device.
2. My attempt as a user to solve the link nightmare
Well, on Twitter, I didn’t have any link nightmare although the use case similar… why?
Simple. If I want to open the link right away I just open, and even if the app is killed, when I return to it, the feed is exactly at the same place (nice!).
That wasn’t an option for Facebook for several reasons.. when I saw interesting links on Twitter I’d… star them.
Most of the times I really didn’t use the star to mark a favorite tweet, I just used it as a bookmark to save that tweet for later use. Unfortunately Facebook has no such thing….
Until the 21st of July….
“Two years after acquiring read-it-later startup Spool, Facebook today launched a basic Pocket competitor called Save. It’s a feature for iOS, Android, and web that lets you store links from News Feed and Facebook Pages for Places, Events, Movies, TV shows, and music to a list where you can view them later.”
UPDATE:
Guess what happened a few months later…
“Facebook is rolling out a new feature in its app that many have offered for some time — an in-app browser — to speed up reading and sharing of links found within the social network. As is the case in many RSS readers and Twitter apps, Facebook’s in-app browser will load the web page of a link you clicked within the Facebook app, rather than tossing you out to Chrome or another browser that you have installed on your phone.”
Although I’m pretty sure that this had really nothing to do with me, it still makes me smile as it makes me think that as a developer I can see how some big-shot apps UX could be improved quite clearly.
Originally published at neteinstein.blogspot.pt on August 1, 2014.
