Under the Hood – Rebuilding Facebook for iOS (Permalink)

Facebook finally released a rewrite of their mobile application, eschewing WebViews in favor of a fully native experience.

Former SOFA developer Jonathan Dann writes:

The development of this new app signals a shift in how Facebook is building mobile products, with a focus on digging deep into individual platforms. To understand how we approached this shift, let's take a look at how Facebook has evolved on mobile.

There are some interesting tidbits in there:

To give another example, we use Core Text to lay out many of our strings, but layout calculations can quickly become a bottleneck. With our new iOS app, […] we asynchronously calculate the sizes for all these strings, cache our CTFramesetters […] and then use all these calculations later when we present the story into our UITableView.

Not having to layout strings yourself is probably the reason why a lot of otherwise native applications use WebViews. They use a similar approach with table view cells, too:

Firstly, when we do our initial asynchronous layout calculations, we also store the height of the story in Core Data. In doing so, we completely avoid layout calculation in -tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath:. Secondly, we've split up our "story" model object. We only fetch the story heights […] from disk on startup. Later, we fetch the rest of the story data, and any more layout calculations we have to do are all performed asynchronously.

If you care about performance on iOS, make sure to take a lot at the article.