Just because Mark Zuckerberg thinks betting everything on HTML5 was Facebook's "biggest mistake", that doesn't mean that the company plans on abandoning the coding platform.
In an interview on Tuesday, the Facebook CEO said that "the biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native" code on the iOS and Android platforms.
HTML5 "just wasn't ready," Zuckerberg added.
But at a small press gathering on Facebook campus Thursday afternoon, the company's iOS team set the record straight. It described the social network as still "bullish" on HTML5, and on Ringmark, the organization it heads to help set HTML5 standards.
Doug Purdy, Facebook's director of developer products, emphasized that Ringmark and HTML5 is still important to the company. Facebook has "an entire team of folks that are focused on HTML5," he said.
So why did Zuckerberg say HTML5 was such a horrible move for the company?
It comes down to performance. While Facebook's mobile app is one of the most popular in the App Store and Google Play, users consistently rated the HTML5 version of the app poorly.
It may have been at the top of the heap when it came to downloads, but it had an average rating of one and a half stars -– not exactly what you want when you're the world's biggest social network.
"It turns out, 'good enough' wasn't good enough," Zuckerberg said of the company's HTML5-based mobile apps.
Facebook realized there was a problem, and 9 months ago it set out to solve it by creating native versions of the app.
"The features were there, but it didn't feel like the experience we wanted to build," says Facebook's Mobile product manager Mick Johnson. Building a native app rather than HTML5 noticeably improved the app's performance.
The native iOS version of Facebook launched just a few weeks ago, and already the company is seeing dramatic results. More than half of Facebook's' iOS users downloaded the update within the first few days it was available, and that 1.5 star rating has jumped to 4 stars.
"I'm much happier using the app that we built," says Johnson, and it looks like the average iPhone-toting Facebook user agrees.
The company has plans to launch a native app for Android soon, and already has an update schedule in place for supporting those apps and turning them into the ultimate Facebook experience.
So where does that leave HTML5?
"People think it's HTML5 or native," Purdy said at the event. "But it's actually 'and'." Facebook still has more users accessing it from the mobile web that it does hitting it from iOS and Android devices. For those users on Safari or Chrome browsers, HTML5 still is the answer.
Peter Deng, who leads development for the company's messaging app says that Facebook has sent people around the world to investigate how users are using their phones in order to create the best mobile experience for people worldwide.
Facebook claims that it is currently being accessed from more than 7,000 different mobile devices. It wants to create the optimal Facebook experience for all 90 million of its users, regardless of what device they might be using.
To build a native app for all of those devices would be impractical, that's where HTML5 comes into the picture.
"We've retooled the company to do everything on mobile," says Deng. "What we're doing slowly over time is making everyone a mobile engineer."
In order to make that happen, thanks to our browsing habits, the company still needs HTML5.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto
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