Facebook is the main social media of today, and its official app brings all its features to mobile devices. Download Facebook app to read your friends’ statuses, write your own, share photos and videos, and repost things you found interesting on the Internet.

Functionality

The app mirrors the web page in most of its features. With Facebook app on your mobile, you can always see what your friends are about and up to. If something you have marked as favorite shares a status, you get notified on that. Just as well you get alerts when someone likes or comments your posts, or contributes to a discussion you have subscribed to.

With this app you can search and see profiles of other people, browse through their photo albums, mark people on them, using intellectual face recognition. Facebook lets you also conduct watch parties, where you run a video to watch it together with your friends or join other people’s watch parties.

The app will make your life easier if you use lots of third-party services that support Facebook authentication. It just takes two taps to connect it to your Facebook account and enjoy the benefits of automatic authorization.

Communities are also supported. You can post to communities, read and publish comments, share external and internal links, and receive notifications about activity in your communities. If you run a public page, you can administer it with this app as well. The payments required for your promotions can be made with iTunes or Google Play billing.

There are also secondary features, like Facebook Marketplace (for buying and selling stuff), Gameroom (for playing games; yet they need to be installed separately), Libra (Facebook’s own cryptocurrency), and more. Not all of them are equally well realized in the app. So Facebook features an entire family of apps, like, say, Facebook Messenger available now separately. This one is the core.

Usability

While the app is better at notifications and displaying options than the web version for mobiles, it’s not perfect. The most frequent complaint is about performance: the app is too heavy to run fast, and in addition, it caches too much data. It’s more noticeable on Android, especially on old or budget devices. On iPhone or iPad, Facebook works quite smoothly, if your device runs an up-to-date iOS version.

The second thing Facebook app lacks is a built-in Messenger functionality. Unlike Facebook Lite, Facebook original app just notifies you that someone has sent you a message; but you’ll need the Messenger app to read or reply.

The rest of the experience is quite similar to that on the web page. Facebook unifies the experience for its users regardless of the platform, so iOS and Android versions of the official client are virtually identical.