Facebook iPhone app also has iPad version embedded inside

Facebook iPhone app is consistently in Apple list of the top 25 free applications download, and for good reason too. The social network has over 750 million active users, there are push enabled notifications so you do not miss a thing, and who would not want to check up on their friends when there is a few minutes to kill? Oddly enough however, there has not been an iPad version of Facebook app, and people have been speculating if thats because the company was pushing to make a browser optimized version that all mobile devices, tablets too, could use. Looks like that theory can now be thrown out the window since Marvin Bernal, a self proclaimed iOS Enthusiast who is studying computer engineering in Canada, discovered that the new version of Facebook (3.4.4) can be modified using a jailbroken iPad to enable the iPad version of the application. For full instructions on how to do this, check out this post on The Next Web, and for a comprehensive gallery of the iPad app.

Now if you are wondering how Facebook can put both the iPad and iPhone version in the same file, its mostly got to do with the way Apple handles apps in the App Store. Instead of releasing multiple versions of an application, one for iPad, one for iPhone, all apps are universal. You download one file and depending on which device you access it on, you get the right version. Google recently decided to do the same thing, seeing as how some developers are writing applications to take advantage of dual core devices, and to distribute them they would have to litter the Android Market with multiple versions of what was essentially the same app.