Gadgetory

hi this is dieter from the verge and this is the new facebook app for iphone and ipad facebook has obviously been giving Android a ton of attention lately with facebook home and its new messenger app but now it's time for iOS to get a little bit of attention to the biggest addition is chat heads these little floating friend bubbles that you can use to have immediate text conversations since iOS is more locked down than Android Facebook can't make them appear anywhere and it can't integrate them with your SMS messages but they do appear inside the Facebook app itself and within that app they do work exactly the same you can drag them around and use them to quickly switch between conversations Facebook is also adding a few other messaging features on iOS like stickers this is something borrowed from other private messaging apps and you can think of them like giant emoji they're big cute pictures you can send up the single tab stickers come in groups and Facebook will offer some for free and probably charge for others they're fun in a silly way but I doubt they'll convince anybody to switch to facebook Messenger you can also only send them from an iphone for now though you can receive them anywhere last but not least Facebook has finally given some real thought to how its app should look on an iPad back in 2010 Mark Zuckerberg famously said that the iPad isn't mobile but since then the company has seen the light and now it's trying to make the ipad app feel a little bit less like a giant iphone app the main changes come in news feed which is now a little bit thinner and your friends avatars are broken out on the left it's not a radical change from how it looked before but it does make your newsfeed much easier to read small design changes like making fonts bigger and more consistent no longer cropping images to an arbitrary aspect ratio and adding more details and Link posts all work together to make it a somewhat simpler nicer experience so that's Facebook six point 0 an iPhone an iPad it's a bunch of messaging features and a little design cleanup but it's not the radical rethinking a facebook on mobile that the company is proposing on Android if it ain't broke don't fix it but maybe slap some fun stickers on there to try and keep things feeling fresh you