You seem to be convinced that there is any way in hell an application that is a client for an existing web service that is little more than a glorified RESTful client needs to be more than 300MB.
You’re either not aware how these kinds of applications are constructed, or you’re perhaps not familiar with just how simple putting an application together like this is. The other response to this comment says a very similar thing.
Yes. I can confidently say as an iOS developer of 8+ years if I was given a chance to manage this application I would certainly be doing the hell of a better job.
If you don’t think you could, that’s cool, but I’ve made my living developing these types of applications since the App Store’s beta, and similar to when I hear an absolutely shitty pop song with mysogonistic or materialistic lyrics funded by some multi-million-dollar artist I say ‘I can do better,’ because, frankly, most musicians worth their salt could.
It doesn’t matter how successful a company is, how much talent they have, if there are too many voices talking over each other nobody is heard. And poor decision making is affecting the app’s bottom line of usage at this point.
When I say I can do better, it’s not coming from arrogance, the Facebook app is actually just that poor that any other direction that it’s current one would be an improvement. The statistic that OP posted alone proves that.
If Facebook has even 25-30 people on their iPhone app, on the client side, they have way too many. We’re talking about pulling existing info from a server and re-displaying it. At what point, other than the tiny shell required to display that information, maybe about 100-150MB at most, is that extra 150-200MB coming from?
If Facebook’s API were open for third-party FB applications, I’m sure I’d not be the first to whip up a minimalistic, small-sized, easy-to-use, far more intuitive application in a month or two of casual dev time. I did a similar thing for Twitter. It’s not hard.
Is it so much more likely that whole extra let’s say 150MB needs to be there than it’s likely that there’s simply too many cooks in the kitchen and optimization is being completely ignored?