Facebook updates iOS app, still poking around for mobile dollars

Facebook is yet to crack the mobile revenue conundrum as its stock continues to be hammered on Wall Street, but in the meantime the company has finally updated its dog of an iOS app.

Shares hardly rallied following Facebook's announcement yesterday that the Apple mobile version of its network had now been updated – instead continuing to limp around the $19 mark.

Facebook had announced that it had speeded things up for Facebook on Apple's iPhone and iPad.

The Mark Zuckerberg-run company claimed that "Facebook 5.0 for iOS is twice as fast as the previous version when launching the app, scrolling through news feed and opening photos in feed."

It added that the app had been rebuilt from scratch – a move that appears to indicate how fed up Zuck's coders were with the previous version.

Meanwhile, Facebook fans with Android-loaded handsets will continue to have to play the waiting game as the dominant social network is yet to update that version of its app.

Apparently, Facebookers are being forced to switch to Android phones to test out the app for Google's mobile operating system.

As The Register's very own mobile correspondent, Bill Ray, put it: "The Android app is most annoying; I've installed it a couple of times only to remove it again when it became too irritating."

And it appears, according to Business Insider, that people working inside Facebook feel the same way about what is a pisspoor app.

Zuckerberg is desperately trying to find ways of making money out of the company's mobile division, especially as users increasingly turn to their smartphones to access what remains – if you exclude crappy Sponsored Stories – an ad-free version of Facebook. ®