A report by Business Insider that Facebook has its employees use Android to improve the company's smartphone app was confirmed by the Los Angeles Times on Friday.
"In order to test our mobile products employees need access to specific devices to test on different platforms (iOS, Android)," a spokesman for Facebook told the Times. "This is obviously different from testing on the Web (where it doesn't matter what kind computer you have)."
The strategy used by the company, referred to as "dog fooding," is often used by tech companies, Business Insider reports.
The social media giant updated its iPhone and iPad app, known to frequent crashing and for being slow, on Thursday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it "a big step forward" on his Facebook page.
According to tech news website, TechCrunch, the new application was rebuilt over a nine month period using Objective-C and not HTML5.
Facebook iOS mobile produce manager Mick Johnson told TechCrunch, "We deliberately made a trade off to get to scale. We used HTML5 to test and try things out, and people love that in the browser, but they have different expectations of a native IOS app. So with this release we rebuilt the app from scratch over the last 9 months and the main improvement is performance. Now there's a lot more code built in Objective-C than HTML5."
The Android app was also updated, but according to the Los Angeles Times, Zuckerberg acknowledged the update was not at bit as the iOS one. No news has been released on when an improved Android version will be released.
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