Facebook News Feed Twice As Fast On New iOS

According to Facebook, the company has answered the call of consumers and made the social media site’s news feed operate 50% faster than the previous version in the iOS app, Mashable reports. The company swapped from HTML5 to native iOS code around two years ago in order to make sure the Facebook app ran as smoothly as possible for users of the site.

However, when this change came about, it soon become obvious to both developers and consumers alike that each time the app updated, the News Feed option would take longer and longer to load. This was quickly associated with data storage issues in the Facebook app; in most iOS apps, the article notes, data models are managed by “core data”, but this was not true for the Facebook app – whilst normal core data would work with a few dozen code entities, it rose very quickly to hundreds for the app.

Adam Ernst, a software engineer for Facebook, noted that as the social media site “added more and more features to the app, every part of the app got slower.” This led to the app developers needing to quickly come up with an alternative way to store the data in order to reduce the number of processes running in the background of the app. This ultimately resulted in creating a much speedier News Feed ticker, which was introduced this summer.

The social media site is continually looking to enhance its user experience, particularly in regards to the News Feed aspect of the site.