Dublin Web Summit: Facebook tells The Next Web why its iPad app came so late

The Next Web’s Martin Bryant was on stage at the Dublin Web Summit today to interview Ethan Beard, Director of Platform Partnerships at Facebook.

When asked for his thoughts on a recent comment by Facebook CTO Brett Taylor, that “a few years from now, every single person at Facebook is going to be working on mobile”. Beard said: “We have 800m users a month on PC Web. We have 350m a month using it on mobile”.

On that note, The Next Web pushed Beard on why Facebook’s mobile app took so long to arrive on iPad, and it seems that Facebook felt it would be working too thinly across multiple platforms, rather than working on the core experience.

“One of the challenges anyone has working on mobile experiences, is that there are a lot of different technologies and a lot of different platforms”, said Beard.

“I remember when the iPad came out, we started saying ‘let’s cook up a team to work on this’, but then we took a step back. We had PC Web, mobile Web, a low-cost site for emerging markets, an Android App, iPhone app and BlackBerry app. We would’ve had more people inside Facebook translating Facebook from the app that we’d built, into all those other platforms than we did have working on the core experience”.

Missed the big deal around Facebook’s iPad app? It’s been feature complete since May of this year, and even caused one of its developers to leave the company.