And the cover idea on profiles. But Facebook's app is still barely usable. For me, profiles take at least 30 seconds to load.

Joe Hewitt's original native app was great. But now that Facebook is moving to using HTML all over the place, it's slow as can be.

Well that's certainly revisionist history. I heard nothing but complaints about the old app too.

I'm not so sure about that. At the time Joe H. wrote the original iPhone Facebook app, it was considered by many of my friends and myself to be a gold standard. It was limited ... sure ... but quite elegant for an initial version. I don't know the details but the App seemed to get buggier as FB started adding more features and changing things. Also, I believe Joe H. moved on to other things at FB. When I complained about how the iPhone app had started to suck, I was told to use touch.facebook.com - at that time, this was a sucky experience and HTML based. None of the subsequent iterations of Facebook's mobile app approached the design eloquence of the original (IMHO). Oh well ...

[FYI: I have no association with FB. I was just a big fan of theirs at that time.]

Path's Android app just plain doesn't work for many of its functions.

Is this what you're talking about?

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/10/sincerity-is-the-sincerest-...

You mean this? (2009)

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/review-tweetie/

Faceted navigation - no one's done that before! ... Let's call it a ripoff and get super mad!

I'm not talking about minor UI features. I'm talking about the whole package.