To me, there's pros/cons to this approach with the perspective of making it as EASY as possible for developers to ship across all types of hardware (which is great). But the con seems so big to me: the end-user experience is so slow (iPhone and Android) that when you think of "Facebook for Mobile", you think "Maybe I can wait to access FB on my iPad or back on my laptop when I'm home?"
All of the native apps that I've seen, played with and analyzed, speed = to some the best experiences for a user. I mean, doesn't a FB user want exactly that when they check the Newsfeed? For instance, today, I turned off 4G and moved to 3G on my Android, checked the FB app and it crawled. It junked new screen loads, comments, liking, etc. Switching over to 4G made (some of) the pain go away.
All of the native apps that I've seen, played with and analyzed, speed = to some the best experiences for a user. I mean, doesn't a FB user want exactly that when they check the Newsfeed? For instance, today, I turned off 4G and moved to 3G on my Android, checked the FB app and it crawled. It junked new screen loads, comments, liking, etc. Switching over to 4G made (some of) the pain go away.