edmicman's Journal: Facebook Android app is crap

The official Facebook app for Android is crap. It recently updated - you would think that updates would bring incremental improvements, but it seems like the FB app makes minimal progress and then leaps backwards time after time. The latest change? It appears that they have gone from a native app to embedding a web view in place of the news feed - for all intents and purposes the app's newsfeed now is identical to just browsing the mobile website. My list of complaints in off-the-top-of-my-head order:

Videos
With this new version was supposedly video uploading support. However, I have yet to actually be able to play within the app videos that I'm pretty sure were posted via FB (as opposed to posting a YouTube link). Every time I've ever tried to watch a video someone else has posted I get the "incompatible format" error. Do I need Flash installed? Can we upload videos, we just can't play them?

Pure Coherent Native Experience
This was a problem before, and now it's even more jumbled. For a long time the Android FB app would kick you to the mobile site for some functions. Digging further into a person's profile for instance. Some links. It disrupted the feel of the app before, and now it's even worse. The main menu is the same old style from before. You go to the newsfeed and it's the embedded mobile site. Then you click through to someone's profile and it's the old app style. Commenting and liking something on a profile wall is different than commenting and liking the same post if you did it through the newsfeed. Same function, but it's broken between the old and new app styles. Then you click on a friend's friend's profile, and it takes you to the mobile profile page for that person.

No (or limited?) Push notifications. As far as I know I won't get notified if someone comments on something of mine.

Newsfeed that is actually embedded web view
I've already noted that I don't like it. It feels like a copout and feels laggy compared to the native listview controls in apps. I can't get "Recent News" to stick as a default - it always reverts back to "Top News". There actually doesn't seem to be a difference between the two at the moment, but that's not the case on the normal site so I would expect that to be a problem at some point, too. There's some stupid slot machine wheel functionality now to change between newsfeed views. Really? Where did that UI decision come from?

General slowness
Granted, this has been a little better since moving to the web newsfeed. Actually, before I would have timeouts refreshing the newsfeed or pulling up images on a regular basis. I'd jump over to the mobile site and it would work fine. That seems a little better now, but lots of times the waiting symbol will just keep spinning trying to load an image. Loading album thumbnails is still very slow and cumbersome, on wifi or 3G.

Weird behaviors
Many times I'll hit back and it goes back, but you're on the same page. It's like it loses where it was or something.

I'm on a stock OG Droid. Anyone else?