14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook engineer Jeff Verkoeyen has resigned from his role with the highly-acclaimed social networking company after months of frustration caused by his employers’ second-thoughts on the release of an iPad-native app.
Discovered in July as a finished product inside the Facebook app designed for iPhones and iPod touch devices, the iPad-native Facebook application was developed by Jeff Verkoeyen, who is now working for Google on the Android back-end.
The reason? His employers held back his app intentionally, according to reports.
Business Insider looked into the matter and now reveals that the app had been done for months. Verkoeyen is said to have put “a ton of time into it.”
Verkoeyen said in a blog post he recently edited that his iPad app was feature-complete in May.
Facebook, however, kept pushing its release out every other two weeks. Verkoeyen now thinks it “may never be released,” according to the report.
The iPad has been around for more than a year and a half yet, to this day, users only have third-party apps that facilitate connecting to the social network on the go to view profiles, add friends, post comments etc.
But none of these solutions delver the complete experience (not to mention the support). Bottom line: users lack an official iPad app from Facebook.
It is being speculated that the main reason behind this approach (to hold back the iPad client) is a rumored dispute between the two giant companies.
Apple is reportedly concerned that Facebook’s web-as-platform will pose risks to the iPhone and iPad in the future.
Facebook, for its part, may be pushing to make iDevices less relevant in the future, which would explain its decision to halt development on the iPad app.
But for now, all we know is that the guy in charge with the Facebook iPad client was so upset his employer put the kibosh on his work that he actually resigned.
That means there’s quite a lot of stuff we don’t yet know about what disruptions may emerge from the launch of an officially supported Facebook app for Apple’s iPad.