iLounge

By Jesse Hollington

Applications Editor, iLounge (Google+)
Published: Monday, September 26, 2011
News Category: iPad, Apps + Games, Other

Business Insider reports that Facebook engineer Jeff Verkoeyen, the developer responsible for building the company’s iPad application has left Facebook to take a job at Google. In a post on his blog earlier today, Verkoeyen expressed frustration that Facebook has delayed the release of the iPad app despite the fact that it has been ready to be released for several months. Verkoeyen noted that he was the lead engineer on the Facebook iPad app back in January and put a great deal of time into the app, which was considered “feature-complete’ in May. Despite this, Facebook reportedly kept repeatedly delaying the release, leading Verkoeyen to believe that at this point the app “may never be released.” Verkoeyen has since updated his blog post to remove details about the iPad application and spoke with Business Insider to clarify that the frustration was his “personally” and was not a “reflection on Facebook as a company.”

In June the New York Times reported that Facebook was planning to launch a native iPad app in the “coming weeks” citing people briefed on Facebook’s plans, and native iPad support was later discovered in a July update to the iPhone and iPod touch application. These reports led many to speculate that Facebook was simply waiting to release an iPad app during the company’s f8 developer conference last week, however no mention was made of the iOS platform at all during the keynote presentation, which focused primarily on major new social features for the web.