How We Built Facebook for iOS
summary
Rewrites the entire iOS app to native code for v5.0, a year‑long effort that ships August 2012 and measures as twice as fast in both stopwatch and perceived speed; replaces HTML5/JS tradeoffs (DOM/layout jank, single‑thread limits) with native rendering, Core Data and Core Animation, automated unit tests and runtime feature toggles so unfinished work can be turned off. Development runs on git with code review in Fabricator, linting/Arcanist, a buildbot rack of Mac Mini build rack, and a fixed four‑week release cadence.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:55Hybrid app history
- 6:16Rewriting for native
- 10:59Team structure
- 16:31Release process
- 22:27Engineering tools
- 30:21Internal build distribution
- 33:56Testing philosophy
- 38:04Conclusion and Q&A
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