After moving the messaging component of its iOS client out into a separate app, Facebook has continued its pattern of breaking up the functionality of its software today by launching a new iOS application called Stickered.
The app launched a few days ago on Android, but only became available today for iOS users. It allows users to add stickers to photos from their camera roll, or overlay them directly on a live camera view before snapping a photo.
Once the photo is decked out with stickers, it can be sent to friends through the separate Facebook Messenger app with a single tap. Users without Messenger installed will be directed to the App Store to get it for free. Photos can also be saved directly to the camera roll for sharing elsewhere.
Stickered is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store.
Description
It’s sticker time! Add cute characters, funny faces and more to make your photos pop.
– Pick as many stickers as you want
– Stick them on before or after you snap a photo
– Decorate photos from your camera roll, too
– Drag, pinch, stretch and rotate stickers to make the perfect scene
– Send your creations to friends with Messenger
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I wanted the “Despicable me” stickers… i still want them, they’re SO FLUFFYYYY !!!
Dumb, when will Facebook realize that we don’t want to go in and out of different apps to use Facebook tools. Dumbest thing to see my Facebook app notify me of a message at which point i have to go and launch a different app just to read that message. In what alternate world do they live in that makes them thing that’s a better user experience.
Probably cause they want more comments / ratings in the app store. I agree, it’s counter productive to have things separate. Luckily, I only use the Facebook Pages app.
This is getting out of hand. Hey Facebook, why don’t you just make separate apps for the newsfeed; one to post and one to read. That fits your logic, right?
Good thing I’m jailbroken and don’t need their stupid messenger app to read/reply to messages. Fncking idiots over at FB. Works just fine with the regular app, it’s gotta be some reason why they have a separate app. Not sure what it could be though.
what … the heck…. is that?
If you don’t like there being two or three separate Facebook apps (four?!), blame Apple and their insistence on sticking to 1GB of RAM. Facebook is merely doing the smart thing based on how iOS works with memory and the limitations of the hardware.
(I’d really like to leave it there and wait, like a troll, for one of the usual gang of idiots to attack my statement, but I won’t…that wouldn’t be nice. Not fair to the trolls on here. Plus this is too important, and obviously no one–Facebook, Apple, or 9to5mac–has done an adequate job of explaining WHY separate, smaller apps are better, so here goes…)
The three things you need to know: Contrary to Fanboi dogma, iOS doesn’t leave a whole lot of RAM available for running apps. Apple has also unwisely chosen to continue using pretty slow flash memory in the iDevices. Lastly, iOS doesn’t use Virtual Memory backing swap. The three things you need to understand: small apps load quicker (duh); have smaller memory footprints that weather purges better (duh); and when iOS runs out of RAM (notice, not “if”, definitely “WHEN” because it does…a lot), it is pretty vicious when purging memory pages…it purges the entire app…THE ENTIRE APP.
Where does that leave developers of big-ass bloated apps (like Facebook had been/is)?
By breaking their apps into smaller chunks (which, by the way, is MUCH more in keeping with the foundations of UNIX, albeit in a very bastardized bloated way), Facebook is able to allow iOS to more efficiently serve their users. Messenger is likely to be an app that users multi-task away from/back into quite a bit during a “conversation”. Facebook is more of a “destination” app. Many people who actually pay attention to such things noticed that Facebook had gotten to a point (still there, really) where launching it pretty much immediately causes a purge of everything else. Had a few Safari tabs open about a subject you want to Message a friend about? They’ll be gone and reloading by the time you fire up Facebook, get to the Messages pane, and start typing a message…wait a minute what was that important fact, just switch back quick…oh damn…reloading. By keeping Messenger itself lighter, more svelte, the chances of it staying in RAM are much better which means it will be quicker to switch to. But also, it being more svelte means that if it DOES get purged it will reload from scratch a lot faster, so the user won’t notice. For users who don’t use Messenger as much, they should be reveling because launching just the Facebook app to view their Timeline now doesn’t drag around and load into RAM all that unneeded/unwelcome Messenger code, which makes the launch less likely to purge other things they might want to switch back to and makes the overall launch experience better. Keep in mind: most “modern” webviews (the amount of memory it takes to render and hold a webpage in RAM) is well over 100MB. Considering the constraints that iOS 8 puts on 512MB devices like the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, given the larger overall memory usage of bigger screen vid buffers, and the 20-30% “penalty” of 64-bit code, the 1GB of RAM in the iPhone 5 and greater still doesn’t afford a lot of working space for more than a handful of apps at a time. Because iOS doesn’t fall back to the “SSD” for VM swap backing, the OS doesn’t have the ability to simply go to the flash and reload individual pages when needed; instead it necessitates a complete reload of the app’s code. If the flash would be faster, this process might be faster; it isn’t, so smaller apps are again better. Basically, the smaller an app’s footprint is, the better your User eXperience will be. And that goes for code as well as the assets (the purdy pictures, widgets and what not), since assets often get loaded into RAM too.
There is probably even be a security component as well. Considering that it is the featureset of Messenger that wants the use of the Camera and Microphone for video/audio chatting, pulling those features out of Facebook means it doesn’t need to have those privileges to begin with. Because Facebook.app is also the code that interfaces with the more “untrusted” data source, that’s a plus. Users who want to turn off those rights, will still end up with a Facebook.app that is fairly functional.
So, my advice? Learn the ‘WHY’ of issues to understand the benefits before just running your mouth about why you hate it. Because, just like racism, that kind of blind, uninformed “hatred” makes you look like a moron.
It has nothing at all to do with iOS device RAM. It’s purely a Facebook policy due to wanting to break away from one monolithic app that does lots of things to several apps that do fewer, more focused things.
You try to sound reasonable, but you let your irrational tech person tribalism show through with things like your use of “fanboi,” so, no.
Okay in that logic, how come they are splitting the apps on Android as well?
Why can’t they just bake this into the Messenger app where the stickers are already there?
I can’t imagine an app I’d want less.
It’s really annoying that Facebook has to make a new app for anything it comes out with. So I can browse Facebook in app, then to send a message I have to switch to Messenger AND THEN to add this stickers to pics I gotta open a 3rd app? Something is not right with that at all.