Last week I launched the second major iteration of Facebook's iPhone app , which finally lives up to our users' expectations and delivers most of the features they wanted. Getting here has been really challenging, and I'm finally at a point where I can reflect back on the experience and try to share what I've learned. The 1.0 version of the app was trashed in reviews for its lack of features, which was really hard for me to take given how hard I worked on it. People must have assumed that all I had to do was plug Facebook's data into Apple's ready-to-use UI components and hit the GO button. I wish it had been that easy, but unfortunately many of the components I needed were missing from the iPhone SDK, even though they existed in Apple's own apps. The lack of a mail composer and a photo browser were particularly disappointing. I had to make a choice: I could dash off weak versions of these components and hope Apple adds the full versions to the SDK later, or I could attempt to replicate them in great enough detail to convince users they were using a standard interface. I chose to take the latter path, and it definitely cost me a lot of development time which could have been used to add more features. One other side effect was that users actually did think they were using a standard interface built by Apple, and so they gave me no love for the work I did, and instead insulted me for not taking the time to deliver more features. In ret ...
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