Tired of waiting for an official Facebook app that’s been optimized for the iPad? Is Safari not making the cut for your daily Facebook browsing? If you’re a light or casual Facebooker, you may be in luck with the new Friendly app. Otherwise, you may prefer waiting to see what Facebook releases for the iPad, hopefully in the near future.
It’s evident that the developers of Friendly - Facebook Browser desired to create an authentic Facebook experience, mimicking its color scheme and a selection of its more popular menu options. These elements have been integrated in a fashion that provides enjoyable viewing on the iPad’s large screen. If you’re interested in viewing the news feed, events, and requests, you’re going to find Friendly’s interface fairly effective. Furthermore, you’re able to view profiles, wall posts, and photos quite efficiently via a few gestures.
Standard Facebook fare looks great.
As a matter of fact, for photo-viewing, the gallery is implemented in an impressive manner, allowing you to quickly navigate between full-screen photos. However, if you want to comment on photos, the interface becomes a bit less glamorous. The post comment icon launches a browser much like Safari but from within Friendly, allowing you to post a comment in the field under the selected image. Well, you could have done that from Safari and saved $4.99.
Although the developer recently added the Facebook chat feature, it is far from flawless. If you have “too many” friends who are online at a given time, you will be unable to scroll through your friend list--so you better hope the friend you’re attempting to contact happens to have a name that ranks highly in alphabetic order. Not so “friendly” after all, especially to those friends whose names start with letters from the tail end of the alphabet!
If you’re a Facebook gaming addict and spend most of your hours playing Farmville or Mafia Wars (or even enjoy the more casual, social gaming aspect), you’re likely to be disappointed with the app because it lacks support for Facebook gaming. Why spend your money buying a Facebook app that does not allow you to use Facebook to its fullest?
Photo-viewing fanatics may enjoy the browser, but the app doesn't replace Safari.
Furthermore, this app will not allow you to import your media, or even modify or delete posts you may have made or ones that others have posted to your wall. While this may not be a huge issue, it’s a desirable feature to have access to, especially if you have paid for access to a service that has prided itself on being free--and will be, once the developers expedite the release of the official Facebook app for iPad. We urge you to wait if you can; purchase this only if you’re willing to compromise functionality because you so greatly desire the enhanced readability.
2 Comments
Also commenting on posts is difficult; sometimes the "comment" link works and sometimes it doesn't. I feel it's unfair to criticize lack of Facebook games support because those are Flash based and we all know the iPad doesn't run Flash. Expecting an app to somehow circumvent that is a bit of a stretch.
This app is total crap...should have given this a 1.
All this app is doing is loading touch.facebook.com, the site they made when the iPad came out. They changed the coding a little so it looks a little different, but all the features, the animations, and everything is the same as that web site I listed. People complaining about the lack of features in this app...well it lacks those features because touch.facebook.com lacks those same exact features. You're basically paying for something you can load up on Safari for free. This app is a complete a total rip off...I think the people rating it so highly is cuz they don't know any better that the site exists.
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