Why Facebook Still Doesn't Have An iPad App

Today at its mobile event, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng gave some (vague) answers as to why there still isn’t an official iPad application.

Zuckerberg was pretty blunt when it came to explaining why there wasn’t an iPad launch during today’s mobile event: “The iPad isn’t mobile”. He later qualified this statement to say that Facebook loves working with Apple, but that the iPad isn’t as mobile as a phone (he’s right).

Tseng stepped in to add that the rise of tablets isn’t going to be about the iPad alone — we’re going to soon see numerous additional devices running on Android and possibly other platforms. And given Facebook’s limited resources, it doesn’t really make sense to hone in on a single platform.

Facebook needs a solution that will let it deploy features across multiple devices quickly, so there isn’t a lag time like there has been between the Android and iPhone apps. In other words, we’re probably going to see a web-based mobile application that’s going to be targeted specifically at the tablet form factor.