Is the Facebook app built using a mobile development platform like PhoneGap or Appcelerator?

Question

I have found numerous that link to the Facebook Application as an example of a hybrid application.

I understand that the term Hybrid App is broadly defined as any smartphone application that wraps a WebView in a native application.

There are mobile phones of the development framework (PhoneGap, Appcelerator, etc.) that allow developers to create applications using the existing skills of web developers (HTML5, Javascript, CSS), while providing access to the basic functions of the phone (camera, address book and etc.).

Therefore, since Facebook is a hybrid application that addresses the basic functions of the phone, such as Push Notifications and the camera, I am curious:

Is the Facebook app built using the mobile development platform?

Answer 1

Your broad definition of a hybrid app might be too big. The entire application running in web browsing is sufficient, but not a prerequisite for a hybrid application.

You can imagine this as a spectrum:

  Pure native Facebook Appcelerator PhoneGap HTML5
      | --------------- | -------------- | ------------- | ---- ------- |

PhoneGap applications, for example, such as you mentioned: "applications that transfer WebView to their own application." However, Appcelerator applications are also hybrid applications, but they do not have to contain a web browsing component. They are hybrid because their user interface is native, but parts of their logic work in Javascript.

Facebook is definitely not built in PhoneGap. Creating your own sliding menu in HTML5 without any performance crashes is nearly impossible with current webviews. There are signs that Facebook is not built in Appcelerator. In my experience, Appcelerator applications tend to have huge file sizes due to its titanium libraries. Facebook should be much larger than its current size if it was built in Appcelerator.

Facebook has the resources to create its own applications, so for common reasons it does not require a structure (development speed, ease of coding).

Finally, and perhaps the best reason I would say that Facebook is not built using a (publicly available) structure, is that if it were, this infrastructure would be 1) happily announcing it to the world or 2 ) from Facebook.

Answer 2

You probably won’t get this information directly from Facebook, since it’s most likely a commercial secret for them, how they carry out their implementation. But because of my “understanding”, most facebook technologies are homegrown, so I doubt that they use any framework like Phonegap. Most likely, this is just an html5 webview built into the native application.

Answer 3

According to these recent articles (September 2012) from Forbes and Mashable , Facebook has recently replaced its mobile HTML5 app with a native version.

Zuckerberg quotes the words: "The biggest mistake we made at the company was that we did too much on HTML5 and not on our own."

I believe that for FB it is worth investing in resources for creating and maintaining codebases for iOS, Android, etc., in order to provide metal-working applications closer to performance.

Answer 4

Facebook uses the forked version of Apahce Cordova, which is the engine of PhoneGap. You will not find much information about this, but it is indicated here: http://phonegap.com/2012/03/19/phonegap-cordova-and-what%E2%80%99s-in-a-name/

“Many Apache Cordova distributions exist today, and this is something we wholeheartedly welcome. For example, Salesforce and Facebook currently have customized versions for their SDKs, and our work at Apache is focused on including this use case (and beyond) "