May 2, 2024

Facebook Engineer Leaves For Google Over Unreleased iPad App

Posted September 26, 2011 at 7:02pm by iClarified · 13127 views
Facebook engineer Jeff Verkoeyen has left the company for Google after working 80 hour weeks on the Facebook iPad app which has been 'feature complete' since May but has yet to be released.

Verkoeyen posted the following comments on his blog which is no longer accessible. (Likely due to high traffic).

It is now nearly 5 months since the app was feature complete and I haven't seen it released except for when the project was leaked on Techcrunch. Needless to say this was a frustrating experience for me. The experience of working on this app was a large contribution to the reasons why I left Facebook, though that doesn't mean it wasn't a difficult decision.

Another key blurb:

You probably saw the app when it was infamously leaked via Techcrunch. It was feature-complete by then and for reasons I won't go into details on the app was repeatedly delayed throughout the summer.

TechCrunch believes that Facebook may be using the app as leverage in its negotiations with Apple and may have even convinced Apple to work with it on a rumored HTML5 platform project.

"Maybe they want Facebook's wildly popular social games to run inside of Facebook's apps - including the iPad app. If this is indeed the case, negotiations may still be underway. That could be why we haven't seen either Spartan or the iPad app yet, even though both are done."

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