Ditching HTML5
cost Facebook the flexibility to tinker and quietly try out design or feature
changes on subsets of users. But now it can experiment again. Thursday Facebook launched a beta club offering some Android users
early access to new features. Thanks to silently downloaded software
updates, Facebook can field test evolutions of its mobile experience so it
doesn’t screw up for hundreds of millions of people.
Between
hackathons, lock-ins, and constant code pushes, experimentation is core to
Facebook’s product development. It designed the system Gatekeeper so it could simultaneously test tons of different
versions of Facebook on tiny fractions of its userbase. New features are often
tested in remote areas like rural New Zealand or on specific demographics like
people with few friends to pull in feedback without alerting the public.
If initial
tests go well, Facebook pushes changes to 1% of users and monitors for bugs,
qualitative feedback, and usage fluctuations. When an update proves stable and
popular, it’s rolled out to 10% and eventually 100% of users. This lets
its miasma of services on the web evolve intelligently.
TRADING
EXPERIMENTATION FOR SPEED
That’s not how
it works on mobile. Typically with native apps, updates go out to all users at
once in the form of software downloads manually pulled from the App Store or
Google Play. That means everyone gains access to new features at the same time,
and it’s harder to gauge impact without changing everyone’s experience for
better or worse.
Facebook
worked around this by wrapping HTML5 pulled live from its website within its
iOS and Android apps. HTML5, while flexible, wasn’t fast enough to satisfy
Facebook’s hundreds of millions of mobile app users. Switching to a native
infrastructure doubled the speed of its apps.
When the
quicker iOS app launched, Facebook’s iOS mobile product manager Mick
Johnson told me, “We deliberately made a trade off to get to
scale. We used HTML5 to test and try things out.” In a Facebook
engineering blog post, Jonathan Dann wrote “We chose to use HTML5
because…it allowed us to iterate on experiences quickly by launching and
testing new features without having to release new versions of our apps.”
Mark
Zuckerberg had recently announced on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that too much
dependence on the mobile web standard before it was ready was one of Facebook’s
biggest mistakes. However, backtracking on HTML5 robbed Facebook of some
ability to experiment. One way Facebook made up for it was testing through its standalone apps. More popular amongst
early adopters than its main apps, Facebook tries out features like audio
messaging and bulk photo uploads in its Messenger and Camera apps. Those
that are well liked graduate into features in its flagship mobile products.
BREAK THINGS (FOR
SOME)
Now thanks to
silent updates, it can meddle with its most popular app, Facebook for Android,
which had 192 million monthly users at the end of December. Thursday it
prompted some users to download Facebook for Android version 141046 and opt in
to early access to beta features, as first reported by Liliputing. This update is only available to some users
who’ve enabled a setting on their Android to install apps from outside of
Google Play. Those who oblige silently download beta updates over wi-fi from
then on. Beta testers do have to manually confirm installation of the updates,
though. If Facebook thinks all its users would benefit from a beta feature, it
pushes a standard Play update to everyone.
It all works a
bit like BlackBerry’s Beta Zone. The silently downloaded
updates are one of the bonuses of Android’s less restrictive ecosystem for
developers. Facebook could potentially do something similar on iOS, but that
would require a clumsier system like TestFlight
where users have to manually drag in updates. This article isn’t meant to say
Facebook ever stopped experimenting on mobile. It moved to updating its apps
every two or four weeks. It just couldn’t do so as stealthily.
The new beta
club could be an exciting opportunity for some hardcore Facebookers. After all,
we’re living in a world where having the newest apps or technology can make you
seem cool like knowing about underground bands used to.
I frequently
see people asking for how they become guinea pigs for Facebook. The company has
only offered limited opportunities to volunteer for testing in the past. It requested test subjects for its since-scrapped Questions product to get it off on the
right foot, and previously accepted applications to become a beta tester,
though it no longer does. Now there’s a clear route to be the first on your
block with the next Facebook features: get an Android and enable sideloading
app updates.
Facebook is
striving to redefine itself as a mobile company. Yet it’s still pushing major
changes to the web first, including the recent launches of Graph Search and the redesigned news feed which have both yet to emerge on iOS
or Android. To avoid disruption by nimble startups that are truly mobile-first,
Facebook will need to continue aggressively iterating on its apps. Luckily now
it’s found a new way to fire up the bunsen burners and cook us the future of
social on the small screen. [Source]
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