A new report from Business Insider claims that Facebook’s iPad app has been feature complete since May, with Facebook engineer Jeff Verkoeyen having quit and taken a job at Google because Facebook never released the app.
Facebook has supposedly been working on a native Facebook app for quite some time, and the iPad app was even embedded and hidden in a prior release of Facebook for iPhone & iPod touch, as was discovered by MG Siegler when he unlocked it on a jailbroken iPad. According to Verkoeyet, Facebook continually delayed the release of the app a bit at a time, and he’s not sure the app will ever be released.
It seems strange for Facebook not to release the iPad app, which many observed seemed to work fairly well when the embedded version was uncovered in July. Business Insider suspects that the app isn’t being released due to disagreements between Apple and Facebook.
A final note comes from Robert Scoble, who suggests that Facebook is simply saving its new iPad app for Apple’s announcement on October 4th, when the iPhone 5 and iOS 5 are expected to be announced.