When I use an app on my phone expect it to work whether I’m online or offline. Look at the standard apps on your phone – email client, text messages, notes apps. They all work when you have no mobile or wifi signal. Sure, you can’t send or recieve new mail, but you can read your old mail – which is a hugely useful feature, and in fact I’d say a vital feature. Say you’re trying to find where you agreed to meet someone when you’re out, and have no mobile signal. No problem, your phone still has that email or text message with the venue stored somewhere.
Now try use the Facebook app offline – it’ll just display a sad smiley and say it couldn’t reach the Internet, and we should try again. I hope your hypothetical friend that you arranged to meet via Facebook likes waiting.
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Last time I checked, all the principle mobile platforms had this crazy thing we like to call “storage” where you can, get this, store things so they’re available later. It’s not hard – we’re been storing data for quite a while now. But in the rush to make their app more flexible when they want to change how Facebook works, this means all the content is formatted on their servers and sent down each time you want to display it. So when I’m in the middle of nowhere, and want to check where it was my friend said we were going to meet, it’s like being back in the dark ages. I can’t get access to information I already accessed once on this device.
I totally agree with Michael Winston Dales. There has been a regression in user experience for some time. Facebook and Google+ are serious offenders in this regard, something I’ve covered earlier (Facebook here and Google+ here). You provide a good user experience by providing a good native app, which looks and behaves like other apps on the platform. User experience is about how something feels to use, not the amount of features it delivers.
Then there is the minor detail of not being able to access content offline, which is just ridiculous.
