Friendly Plus Social Browser 17+

UPDATE: The very latest update seems to have resolved the issues I reported below and reverted the app to the wonderful less-crowded and more-sane interface. I’m guessing perhaps Facebook’s latest update stymied the devs for a bit? Anyway, happy to be back up and running!

Genuinely unfortunate: this has been the app I’ve recommended for *years* to friends and family looking to escape the mess of Facebook’s invasive tracking and awful UI. Unfortunately the latest update has removed everything successful about this app (the clean & usable UI, the filtering and ad blocking, the custom filters) and replaced it with a broken encapsulation of the Facebook mobile UI, which is a mess-and-a-half on its own. If I wanted that, I’d load Facebook in Safari. One hopes this is temporary or I guess I’ll need to find a replacement for Friendly.

I switched many moons ago and have not looked back; however, I am getting tired of the problems that occur after many updates. The most recent problem occurs when I change orientations of my iPhone either intentionally or usually unintentionally. The app loses my place and starts over at the top of the stream. This is highly annoying when I am down in a stream and want to read a document that is wider than the screen. I rotate the device and instead of showing the page I was reading it snaps back to the top. I scroll back to the page to read it. When I am finished, I turn the device back to vertical and once again the app snaps back to the top of the screen. Guess I’ll use another app until you get the latest screw up corrected.

I really wish you would take more care with your updates. You have a good app, but it seems that nearly ever other update something infuriating like this happens.

Anytime you’re editing a post you need to scroll up by swiping down to get to the top in order to press the post key on the upper right corner. But, if you scroll a little bit too far the page your on refreshes and you loose everything you wrote. The same thing happens when you type a long post and try to add photos to it; I’ve had so many thoughtfully written posted get deleted because of this bug that I’m deleting this app and going back to Facebooks app. At this point I don’t care what anyone does to me or my data, or who they sell it to; I just want to be able to post anything without loosing everything I wrote over half the time. How is it that this bug persists? Why didn’t I uninstall this app a long time ago? If you’re precise enough to scroll without causing the page to refresh before click the post button, then you’ll probably be really good at gold cause that’s what it feels like I’m playing. But the difference is if you don’t scroll a hole-in-one every time, you loose everything you’ve written!