Facebook App Architectures Compared ⇥ engineering.fb.com

Dustin Shahidehpour of Meta earlier this week:

Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta. Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.

[…]

FBiOS was never intentionally architected this way. The app’s codebase reflects 10 years of evolution, spurred by technical decisions necessary to support the growing number of engineers working on the app, its stability, and, above all, the user experience.

Mohsen Agsen of Meta in March 2020 (previously linked):

In the end, we reduced core Messenger code by 84 percent, from more than 1.7M lines to 360,000. We accomplished this by rebuilding our features to fit a simplified architecture and design. While we kept most of the features, we will continue to introduce more features over time. Fewer lines of code makes the app lighter and faster, and a streamlined code base means engineers can innovate more quickly.

[…]

Overall, our approach was simple. If the OS did something well, we used it. We leveraged the full capability of the OS without needing to wait for any framework to expose that functionality. If the OS didn’t do something, we would find or write the smallest possible library code to address the specific need — and nothing more. We also embraced platform-dependent UI and associated tooling. For any cross-platform logic, we used an operating extension built in native C code, which is highly portable, efficient, and fast. We use this extension for anything OS-like that’s globally suboptimal, or anything that’s not covered by the OS. For example, all the Facebook-specific networking is done in C on our extension.

I am sure there are valid reasons for Meta to treat these applications differently, but reading these posts back to back sound like they are from two completely different companies.