Yet the service was not intended for iPhones, and iOS doesn’t support it

Apr 19, 2013 12:18 GMT  ·  By

Facebook’s product design director Julie Zhuo reveals in a blog entry that Facebook Home, a new social experience for Android customers, was actually coded using Mac and iOS dev tools.

In fact, Zhuo says that, had it not been for QuartzComposer – which ships with Apple’s Xcode developer toolset – prototyping Facebook Home would have been painstakingly difficult, if not impossible.

“Not only does QC make working with engineers much easier, it’s also incredibly effective at telling the story of a design. When you see a live, polished, interactable demo, you can instantly understand how something is meant to work and feel, in a way that words or long descriptions or wireframes will never be able to achieve. And that leads to better feedback, and better iterations, and ultimately a better end product. When you are working on something for which the interactions matter so greatly—in this case, a gesture-rich, heavily physics-based ui—anything less simply will not do.”

Ironically, Facebook Home is not compatible with Apple platforms. However, a recent update to the official Facebook iOS app brings some of that functionality to Apple customers. Go ahead and check it out here.