Just finished reading a good interview with a Facebook Engineering leader, Jocelyn Goldfein. She shares how Facebook had stumbled on their mobile journey and learned painful lessons. They are now applying those lessons to create new mobile apps and they have greatly improved the legacy apps. -- Niraj "The big thing we did wrong at the outset was that we wanted to approach mobile like it was a web end-point. We really wanted to take our style and speed, our habits from the web and modify as little as possible to land on mobile. It was just a backward approach." "What we learned to do is start with the [mobile] platform and make the best possible application for it and to the extent that the web has things that are useful to bring them over — but don’t start from the web and try to bring them over. Start from mobile, and take what’s good from the web."

Later in the article, Jocelyn Goldfein shares additional insight into their HTML5 mistake. The fix was to be User focused and to go with Native apps! Seems so obvious nowadays that one should focus on a great User Experience. As the interviews reveals, there are many things that contribute to a decision. -- Niraj "Then we had our ill-fated [decision]: Wait we know how to solve this and instantly turn every one of those web developers into mobile developers, we’ll just go with an HTML5 app! Boom, we’re done, right? Only, wrong." VentureBeat: "Was there a particular reason you think the HTML5 apps just didn’t work?" Goldfein: "I think our whole approach was wrong. I think we just came from a place of, hey we’ve got all these engineers and we’re building all these features, we want to move as fast as possible, so the best platform for us is to just reuse that code and just shoehorn the web onto that smartphone." "I don’t think we came from the place of thinking about the person who’s going to be using Facebook, and what’s the best experience we can give for them. "I think if we started with that person-centric approach, we would just want to build the best possible experience we could for them." "And I think that’s a native experience right now."

That interview provides evidence for us who have Clients that simply want a mobile responsive version of their web site. Rather than simply making a skinny version of the Client's web site, the focus should be on the needs of the mobile users for that Client. It is a hard-sell and requires methodical thought and brainstorming. And it asks for an open-minded Client that is willing to turn away from the lure of going from Web to Mobile (Bootstrap + Cordova). Mobile first, y'all ! -- Niraj

Great lessons, not just for Facebook alone but for all developers. There must now be clear difference between web and native app, Thanks @Niraj Shah for sharing this great caution!

This is a really interesting debate. I've also seen the opposite...in enterprise projects, the challenge is not the UI, but is getting data from legacy databases. Developers have spent too much time trying to create really beautiful user experience and then crashed when they couldn't make the data connections work. That's why I like BT because you can create a very fast, very effective front end UI natively, without burning too much time, then focus on the back end. Currently trying to hook BT to cloudmine.me, which is an enterprise back end connector :)