Facebook’s latest iPhone app is out now in Apple’s store
Apple finally approved the latest version of Facebook’s iPhone app, which pulls in broader functionality from the Web.
You can upload videos and photos and RSVP to events. The news feed is closer to what you’d see on Facebook’s site and you can “like” posts or photos. When looking at other people’s profiles, you can see mutual friends and make friend requests. There is also a built-in web browser for shared links.
The app doesn’t have push notifications yet, but they’ll likely come in version 3.1 along with a landscape-viewing option. (Landscape viewing actually snuck into this version.)
Apple’s approval comes after the app’s designer, Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt, launched into a full-scale rant against the iPhone app store approval process:
“…I have only one major complaint with the App Store, and I can state it quite simply: the review process needs to be eliminated completely.
Does that sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well, it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way, and it has served millions and millions of people quite well for a long time now.”
Hopefully, Hewitt’s a little calmer now…
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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler
Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.