Facebook does a lot of things right. It has to, to have such a huge following of people. But there are still some things they do wrong. My biggest problem with Facebook, right now? The painfully bad mobile app. 

As you may have heard, Facebook’s big developer conference – f8 – happened today. A lot of us – including me – were hoping against hope that they might release some grand update to their iPhone app, but so far, no such thing. It’s in serious need of a revamp.

But what exactly is wrong with the mobile app? Well, the biggest one is the dreadful notifications system. Say you get a notification in Facebook – someone comments on your status or mentions you in one of theirs. What happens? Well, if the app worked right, you would instantly receive a push notification and a badge would appear on the Facebook icon. You would tap the notification or open the app, hit the notification, deal with it, and the whole thing would be over. But how does it really work? Someone comments on your status. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you may or may not get a pop-up about it. So you open the app, and tap the notifications bar. It’s usually not actually there. So you wait around for it to show up. But let’s assume it does. You tap it. You deal with the notification in whatever fashion pleases you, and you close out of the app. You would think, at this point, the badge on the Facebook app would go away. But it usually doesn’t. Maybe it will in an hour or two.

This one big flaw, the terrible notifications system, makes the app almost unusable for me. I can never reply to comments from my phone because usually, it’s ten, fifteen, even thirty minutes until I even get the notification. By then, the moment has passed and the conversation is over. Does that seem like a good idea, Facebook? No. It doesn’t.

This app is approaching three years old, without a major change or upgrade. People have been clamoring for one for quite a while now – it’s getting stale, it has plenty of bugs, and the notification system just doesn’t work. They continue focusing on more and more changes to the website that, in the end, just confuse the consumer. Instead, they should focus on fixing the real problems on the mobile front. Who agrees? Replies in the comments!