Facebook’s new Android app has done away with the previous hybrid HTML5-based model in favour of a native approach, in a bid to improve the user experience.

Facebook for Android 2.0 is twice as fast as the version it replaces, the company claims. Users can therefore expect an app that launches more quickly and provides a more rapid response when looking at photos, timelines and notifications.

“To support the unique complexity of Facebook stories across devices, we’re moving from a hybrid native/webview to pure native code, allowing us to optimise the Facebook experience for faster loading, new user interfaces, disk cache, and so on,” explained Facebook for Android engineer Frank Qixing Du in a blog post.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in September that the company made a mistake when it bet on building apps that run on any type of device using HTML5 technology rather than writing individual apps for specific operating systems.

Facebook launched a fully-native version of its app for iOS several months ago and has now done the same for the Android version to ensure the social network user experience is the same across different platforms.

Qixing Du added that the new release sets a “solid foundation” to continue to make the appeven faster, smoother, and feature-rich”.