The excitement surrounding yesterday’s Facebook v3.0 update rapidly turned into frustration for many users after both of the app’s new features ended up not working exactly as described, which has forced the company to issue a fix in less than 24 hours.
Yesterday’s v3.0 update added push notifications to the Facebook app and also added a welcomed contact syncing feature, but sadly, the push notifications turned out to be a shell of themselves without the vibrate and sound portion working, and contact syncing caused other apps that accessed the address book to stop working entirely.
Facebook issued a new update this morning, v3.1.1, that fixes the nasty contact syncing bug, but they have failed to address the push notification issues.
Feel free to update your Facebook app knowing that it at the very least won’t break anything, it just won’t work exactly as you had hoped.
To fix sound and vibrate they don’t need to push out an update, it’s a server payload issue in their JSON. They can fix it themselves on their servers very easily.
I have one question.
Do the syncing feature will replicate my iPhone address book into the facebook contacts?
In that case, my FB contacts are going to be able to see my iPhone sync’ed contacts?
Is that right?
The Facebook syncing simply adds a link to a your contact’s Facebook page and profile pictures if they are missing.
Thanks for the tip.
Thanks for the good news. I keep sounds turned off so that’s not an issue for me with the new push notifications. I might use the sync, but only to pull FB info into contacts, not replacing photos, etc.
It replaced all my pics I had in my address book. I even told it to NOT sync pics. Didn’t do the 3.1.1 update just yet. I’ll let someone else try and post their findings.
Well, I must say that I am definitely happy that the push notifications finally made it to the Facebook app, but, like others mentioned, it would be REALLY nice if there was some kind of feedback (sound/vibrate) as well. As for the contacts sync issue, that one REALLY messed things up for me!! I have my contacts/email/calendars all sync’d via Google Exchange, and as soon as I sync’d my Facebook with it everything flatlined on me. That being said, I just turned off the Facebook sync, but I ended up having to delete my Google Exchange account and redo everything else though. >:-( Also, another thing that I didn’t like about the Facebook sync was that all of the pictures it added to my contacts list were of EXTREMELY low quality! I mean it’s a nice idea, but I’ll just add in my own pics if that’s the way it’s going to work. Well, I guess there’s always another update, but I still might pass on it (the sync portion) after having to completely redo everything the last time.
I rather like the silent notifications. Is there a way to set it that way once they “fix” it?
Yes. Go to Settings -> Notifications -> Facebook. There you can toggle Sound, Badges, and Alerts on or off. You can also toggle vibrate in Settings -> Facebook.