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Facebook launches App Center

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Re: Facebook launches App Center

#41

Post by joefreeman »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #37
digitalengineer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Zuckerberg said: Move fast, fix later. Design is important (hell, I'm a designer) but not the most important thing when launching. They'll improve it later. They didn't go around buying up talented designers like SOFA for nothing: http://www.madebysofa.com/

" Like Zuckerberg said: Move fast, fix later." And you will have a good enough product but never an awesome one, as "later" never comes, and when it comes the person that created the feature is not in the company or is not available or does not remember why he did it the way he did it or they are cascade bugs.... This approach was used by American cars and was very good for testing different things while the industry…

That doesn't seem like a fair comparison. A fairer comparison would be if the car companies continuously replaced your car with a free upgrade. I could cope with that.

Re: Facebook launches App Center

#42

Post by 0x0 »

mrich wrote: post #33
0x0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. A free-of-charge iOS app can be published world-wide literally with the click of a single checkbox ("All stores") in iTunesConnect.

Has this always been the case? No, Apple gradually made all these countries available. Terms of use have to be drafted and reviewed by lawyers for each country. This will take time. Why go through all that trouble and wait months if you can gain valuable insights by a quick launch in your most importanht market?

Facebook's apps on the app store do not make use of the option for a custom EULA, so nothing there needs translation. If they are already launching for the US store, what possible benefit could there be to withhold the app from the many (small) european app stores?

(And then proceed to put up huge banners in the other apps hassling users to download the new facebook camera and pages apps - even going so far as to provide a button that sends you an international SMS with a link that doesn't even work)

Re: Facebook launches App Center

#43

Post by 0x0 »

frosty wrote: post #40
arihant wrote: post #17

"The App Center will begin rolling out to people in the U.S. today" What is up with Facebook and US-only products? Their Camera app is not available in most countries. Even their app for managing Pages isn't available in my app store (they still keep showing me the annoying message to download it). And it takes them literally order of magnitude of months (if ever) to get their products worldwide, like with Facebook c…

You need to translate things for an international rollout which takes time. Plus US is a known devil and easier to rollout and look at numbers to fix the glitches.

Doesn't sound right to me, I think many european users are fine with an app in English (in fact, many probably prefer it)

Re: Facebook launches App Center

#44

Post by smackfu »

It's a nice idea to have a common app store for all platforms. I imagine the flow is supposed to be:

1) You friend uses Pinterest or Spotify and has a wall post from it.

2) You are interested so you follow the link to that app.

3) You follow a link to the new app store.

4) The app store provides downloads for iOS / Android / desktop / etc.

The point from Facebook's end is that step (3) would currently be a link outside of Facebook. If they can keep that inside, better for them.

Re: Facebook launches App Center

#45

Post by digitalengineer »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #37
digitalengineer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Zuckerberg said: Move fast, fix later. Design is important (hell, I'm a designer) but not the most important thing when launching. They'll improve it later. They didn't go around buying up talented designers like SOFA for nothing: http://www.madebysofa.com/

" Like Zuckerberg said: Move fast, fix later." And you will have a good enough product but never an awesome one, as "later" never comes, and when it comes the person that created the feature is not in the company or is not available or does not remember why he did it the way he did it or they are cascade bugs.... This approach was used by American cars and was very good for testing different things while the industry…

The car-analogy is false. Or did you get your car for free and will it be replaced with a better car next month?

From his video: "Actually one of the core values of Facebook is is "Move fast." And we used to write this down by saying, "Move fast and break things." And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think that's still basically true. I mean, right now, we've optimized so much of our culture around just making it so that people can come and build things quickly. Right, whether it's everything from having the right tools in the right development environment to build things quickly, to nightly code pushes, hiring the best people who have a bias towards just pushing things very quickly, very entrepreneurial. The whole culture is tuned around that. And I think there's probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something not to not make mistakes." http://www.sweetspeeches.com/s/1889-mark-zuckerberg-moving-f...

I didn't think anyone would argue against it as it's how most startups build. Besides software is never 'done' correct?

Re: Facebook launches App Center

#47

Post by arihant »

frosty wrote: post #40
arihant wrote: post #17

"The App Center will begin rolling out to people in the U.S. today" What is up with Facebook and US-only products? Their Camera app is not available in most countries. Even their app for managing Pages isn't available in my app store (they still keep showing me the annoying message to download it). And it takes them literally order of magnitude of months (if ever) to get their products worldwide, like with Facebook c…

You need to translate things for an international rollout which takes time. Plus US is a known devil and easier to rollout and look at numbers to fix the glitches.

Sure. But that shouldn't be a reason to not launch it in India, for example. I have never seen a non-english keyboard in my life here.

Very few countries have internationalization as a necessity. For most places, having the app in native language is a plus, but most people still frequently use the web in English.

I mean, Instagram could figure all the rollout challenges with a single digit amount of people. One would expect a post-IPO company to do so too.

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