Yesterday Facebook launched Facebook Camera, a standalone app that finally addresses some of the crippling issues in uploading pictures to the world’s biggest social network via mobile. It smacks more than a little bit of the company’s recent purchase Instagram, but what’s really interesting are the ratings. Has Facebook actually made a good app?
Facebook Camera for iOS joins Facebook Pages Manager, Facebook Messenger and the main Facebook apps on the App Store. It’s designed to make uploading single or multiple photos a lot easier, and adds Instagram-style filter options to the mix, too. And it ain’t half bad.
At least, that’s what the ratings are saying. Running through the app is a very similar experience to Instagram, but in a good way – it all seems to work, which is more than can be said of Facebook’s other apps. If you look at the reviews, Facebook Camera has (at the time of writing) has just shy of 90 reviews, at an average of four stars.
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That makes it the best rated Facebook app going. Pages Manager has three stars, Messenger has three and a half stars and Facebook itself just two. We’ve spoken in the past about how woeful the main app is due to the many constraints in launching a multi-platform app that has to be the same across the board, but this is positive news.
It’s worth noting that Facebook Camera isn’t yet out on Android, which is odd in itself, but also that the average rating for Facebook apps on Android is generally a lot higher than their iOS counterparts. Still, the app’s positive early reviews for iOS seem to suggest that Facebook’s turning its app portfolio round.
There’s still a way to go, though: ‘iLoader for Facebook’ by Ky Vu, which does a similar job to Facebook Camera but for £0.69, has four and a half stars from well over 700 ratings.
