Friendly Plus Social Browser Reviews

Updating this review to note that the most recent update (summer 2023) has further broken FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser. Instagram won’t load at all and Facebook loads incorrectly 9/10 times. (The good news is that I’m now finally deleting my Facebook.) It’s a shame because it was once the perfect app. Now it’s unusable.

I loved FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser (paid version) because it let me sort Facebook posts by most recent instead of letting an algorithm direct my attention. And I love the ability to block ads. But lately it’s become increasingly buggy. Sorting by most recent no longer shows every post. And, as of today, I can no longer see groups (which I prefer to check manually instead of following). I hope they update it. I will probably keep it since I’ve already paid, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone searching for a functioning way to manage social media accounts.

There was a time when Friendly was a must have for anyone who was tired of Facebook ads and irrelevant stuff on your feed. Those days are over. FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser promises to block ads, what they do not tell you is that what they do is CURATE your ads, sound familiar? Friendly receives money from companies to effectively bypass their ad blocks. Again, sound familiar? Facebook takes money from companies and shows you their ads; friendly takes money from companies so they can bypass ad blocks and you are shown those ads by friendly. You might as well just use Facebook and eliminate 3rd party ads, then.

Do yourself a favor, don’t waste one cent on advertising he same headaches you can get for free on the Facebook app. Do not give these people money when they are not going to do what they promised

Something broke in one of the recent updates. Now it abruptly quits while I’m browsing. On Startup, it throws a “This Browser is no longer supported” error before the Friendly Plus newsfeed appears. (IIRC, Friendly Plus is using Safari? I don’t get to choose so I can’t do anything about this error.) My newsfeed is overrun with ads, People I Might Know, Recommended Pages, Recommended Groups, etc., all of which I have previously disabled. If I drill down on a picture, I’m not able to save it locally OR close it, I have to completely shutdown FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser . The same thing happens sometimes when I click-through by selecting More… on a post in a vain attempt to read more. I see almost no posts from my Friends or Pages and Groups that I DO follow and want to see. This was previously my favorite app and I recommended it to everyone. Not any more. I’ve gone back to reading FB in a Browser because at least I didn’t PAY for that daily aggravation, unlike Friendly Plus.

I used to LOVE FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser for Facebook. It used to be great! But now it no longer works - it just passes Facebook’s horrible mobile UI through. It no longer blocks ads or any content I had it set up to filter. I’ve reported this bug numerous times to the developer via FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser for well over a month. No response. There’s been a couple updates to it since, but the issue remains unresolved months later. I’d sincerely appreciate it if the developer could use an in-app message or something to let us know whether they’re working on this or not. That would help me know if I should patiently wait, because I’m about ready to abandon it completely - which is sad, as I’ve used FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser faithfully every day for years. Seriously, I’d be willing to pay a small subscription fee for FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser if they’d keep it working. I realize that it could be Facebook screwing things up, but again, it would be nice if the developer of FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser could somehow message us to let us know that, so they don’t take all the blame.

UPDATE: It’s been months now and this hasn’t been addressed. If you open the Friendly+ app you might as well be in Facebook with all of the Suggested for You and ads that appear in your feed. It’s horrible. I’ve emailed support multiple times reporting this and sending logs to try to get a response. Nothing. So they are officially down to 1 star. I’ll keep checking every week or so and looking for an update but not holding my breath. | The big reason I paid for this is to block ads on Facebook and be able to customize my feed there. But it seems to have gone haywire again. I have settings to block sponsored ads, filter my groups out, etc but they’re still appearing in my feed. Something is broken guys. Needs attention ASAP

Anytime you’re editing a post you need to scroll up by swiping down to get to the top in order to press the post key on the upper right corner. But, if you scroll a little bit too far the page your on refreshes and you loose everything you wrote. The same thing happens when you type a long post and try to add photos to it; I’ve had so many thoughtfully written posted get deleted because of this bug that I’m deleting FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser and going back to Facebooks app. At this point I don’t care what anyone does to me or my data, or who they sell it to; I just want to be able to post anything without loosing everything I wrote over half the time. How is it that this bug persists? Why didn’t I uninstall FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser a long time ago? If you’re precise enough to scroll without causing the page to refresh before click the post button, then you’ll probably be really good at gold cause that’s what it feels like I’m playing. But the difference is if you don’t scroll a hole-in-one every time, you loose everything you’ve written!

Some update to Facebook yet again removed the option to sort by most recent, never mind the fact that it would never stay on that setting anyway. FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser immediately is miles ahead - right from setup (which only takes seconds) I can choose to set the news feed to most recent, and it stays that way! Plus I don't have to download yet another app just to be able to message on Facebook now (I stubbornly refused to ever download or use their messenger app, I think that's such a crap model). And, no ads. Well worth the $3, highly recommend!

Update January ‘24:

Not working nearly as well anymore. The top bar is inaccessible and when I refresh the most recent feed for new posts, it takes me to another view entirely - all of a sudden it’s things from days ago appearing first in the feed and I can’t go back to the most recent view unless I force quit and reopen FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser

I used to love FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser and recommended it to all my friends, but over the last few months it’s become so buggy that I think I’m going to have to find something else or go back to the Facebook app.

It was a great way to still have Facebook and messenger in one app, but it’s now just loading the mobile web version of Facebook and messenger can no longer be accessed. Also because of this, the UX/UI is terrible and not user friendly whatsoever.

Before that, it wouldn’t let me expand or read comments on most posts of groups I was subscribed to. So if I saw a post from a group in my feed, it’d tell me the post didn’t exist. So I’d have to go to my computer and find it in the group to read the full post, see comments, or write a response (including my own posts in groups!)

I emailed them about both of these issues with screen shots but never heard back or acknowledged they know it’s a problem. It seems I can read group posts now but the web feed is terrible, and I can’t access messenger.

Also, before messenger went down, I was messaging a girl about an upcoming trip, but she wasn’t on my friends list. I could not find the messenger convo anywhere on FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser even though it gave me the notification I had a new message. I had to go to my computer to read it.

Maybe I’ll try back in a few months to see if they worked out the bugs, but for now, it’s not really usable and hasn’t been for a while.

I been using Friendly+ for a bit now and if we are comparing it to the Facebook app I’d have to say that this feels a bit like the mobile site. Things just don’t load like they load on the Facebook app, I’m looking forward to the advances that this developer will do to FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser later on. The one thing that I do definitely appreciate about FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser is the dark mode feature that Facebook for some reason just doesn’t have at all. Strange. FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser is very good tho. I’m looking forward to the advances in features and overall user interface experience that friendly will add or polish, bc I definitely think it needs a lot more polishing. The one item I’m getting a lot of crashes on is the color changer option.. every time I want to change the color of FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser once logged in, it just crashes instantly without warning. Every single time.

Just purchased FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser and I’m having issues already. First: FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser is not showing any posts at all. It just says “Welcome to Facebook”. No matter how many times I refresh or restart FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser , it says the same thing. Second: I posted something as a test to make sure it was working correctly and was unable to delete it by touching the post options (the three horizontal dots). I even tried to reinstall FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser twice.

FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser seems like a wonderful thing if it would work properly.

Edit: There seems to be an issue with the Most Recent sorting. Most Recent shows no posts at all, yet Top Stories makes FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser function normally so far. Changed my rating, but the Most Recent option needs to be addressed.

I’ve had this a couple years now, and install it now and then for a bit, but always end up back with the Facebook app.

It is good at blocking ads, and I like that I can download videos.

It’s hard to keep using, however, because it doesn’t refresh to show new things on my feed. I try to refresh in FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser and restart FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser , but it only shows me a fraction of the posts I can see in the Facebook webpage or iOS app. I’ve messed with the settings for how the feed is sorted, like most recent or most popular, but that doesn’t fix it. It seems to recycle the same handful of posts, then tells me there are no new posts.....I’ve been on Facebook for 14 years with lots of friends and subscriptions, and as mentioned, the other places I use Facebook don’t say that.

It also doesn’t notify me like it should. I’ve gone through all the settings, made sure the notifications were on, background refresh, etc., but it still doesn’t.

I like it, but I wish it showed me all posts and notified me.

Pros:
• Can view Facebook news feed in most “recent mode” with ads and other annoying things like “do you know these people?” removed and most of the other parts of it work great.
• Instagram works a lot better too.
• Price of app is worth viewing Facebook without ads (it’d be more worth it if Twitter and Instagram got the same treatment).

Cons:
• Notifications are spotty and inconsistent.
• Twitter still shows sponsored tweets and you can’t swipe from the left edge to go backwards. This wouldn’t be annoying if the “back” arrow didn’t appear at the top sometimes while on the bottom other times.
• The Friendly menu where you can choose between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram - why do I have to scroll this? It only allows for those three apps to be on this page, so why not just display the three buttons on screen at the same time? Also, why can’t I add others (Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest) on that menu?
• NEW: It’d be nice if I could switch between the sites without losing my place. If I wanted to post a Tweet to Facebook. I’m starting to hop between this and the other app, which is making me wonder why I’m using this one...

Hi. I paid to remove ads and show support and I really do like FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser but there are a couple of things that are kind of confusing at times. For one, I can look at notifications and I can click on every single one of them but Friendly, will still show notifications at the bottom and also when I leave FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser , the badge on the icon will still show them. I wish you could fix this. I know it’s not a major thing but it is very confusing.

Also, Friendly will not show the messages that I have sent right away in the texting (messenger) part. I have to refresh the text window to see the text I just sent. It was confusing to me at first because any other messenger app I’ve used will update the text window right away but not this one.

So I have to resort to using Facebook Messenger, which is an unnecessary extra that I should not have to do.

It’s possible that you have fixed these problems, but because the new updates have such bad reviews, I’m afraid to update. :(

Just want to add a thank you for all the good things about FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser! I know trying to keep your app working is a challenge with Facebook constantly making changes!

I switched many moons ago and have not looked back; however, I am getting tired of the problems that occur after many updates. The most recent problem occurs when I change orientations of my iPhone either intentionally or usually unintentionally. FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser loses my place and starts over at the top of the stream. This is highly annoying when I am down in a stream and want to read a document that is wider than the screen. I rotate the device and instead of showing the page I was reading it snaps back to the top. I scroll back to the page to read it. When I am finished, I turn the device back to vertical and once again FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser snaps back to the top of the screen. Guess I’ll use another app until you get the latest screw up corrected.

I really wish you would take more care with your updates. You have a good app, but it seems that nearly ever other update something infuriating like this happens.

Facebook story saving is not working please fix!!
My issue is when someone post a story only one & it’s a video it’s not downloadable even when the video goes full screen there is a download button but it doesn’t work at all. unless they have a second story. You check the second story usually you need it to be a picture for the download button to comeback & work. Can this be fixed to always have the download button there & function properly?

I had a similar issue with instagram stories not too long ago & that did get fixed! Thx!

I’ve been using Friendly+ for years, and it appears to be the only Facebook client app (besides FBs own kinda lame app) that’s still being actively supported.

But ever since maybe a month or so ago, I’ve had 2 consistent issues - 1. If I leave FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser and return later, most of the time, the control bar across the bottom vanishes. If I was writing a post, there’s no way to hit a Post button.

2. Bigger problem, it will now completely randomly go to a screen saying "Refresh and try again. Hi user, your action failed probably your view/page is out of sync with the backend. Refresh the page, cross your fingers, and try again." — this appears randomly when I want to share a post from a group or friend.

This has NEVER happened since I’ve been using FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser, and now it happens so often, it makes me want to only share posts from the desktop browser. PLEASE fix this issue soon - this is THE best FB app for the iPad by far, but I may have to start using the official app if this keeps going. It happens on both the iPad as well as iPhone versions.

It’s essentially a web browser I wouldn’t even consider it a web wrapper bc they make very little effort to mod the UI.

I have premium & have had it for many years & I can tell you that even on premium you’ll still ads on various social media so I’m not entirely sure what the ad blocker is doing.

As an experiment I used Twitter on brave browser for a month & I experienced zero ads. So devs take note of that & please do something about ads on your app or stop advertising no ads with ad blocker bc that’s simply not true. Idk what browser they use but it obviously isn’t on par with brave browser.

Customization could use a revamp. Maybe new icons, new UI features SOMETHING. FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser feels stale.

The download feature is a hit or miss as well. For example on instagram clicking on a profile would break the download feature. Or simply going back to the previous page would break it. The buttons for downloading (when it does work) are huge & block most of the media underneath. It’s annoying. This is also partly why I say FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser frees stale.

These are my main gripes but I’m still giving it 4 stars simply bc there’s nothing better on FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser Store as of now.

After all the shenanigans they've pulled over the years, I refuse to use the official app. Friendly lets me check in on a few groups and people that are only on FB. I pop in for a few minutes a couple times a day, and don't tend to scroll back very far, so I haven't encountered any issues in that area.

The one issue that crops up more than I'd like is the inability to view photos at full size, both in FB and Instagram posts that are shown in FB. This is particularly noticeable on the iPad, where photos are noticeably low resolution and pixelated. This has happened before and been fixed, so I'm hoping Friendly will be updated again soon to resolve the issue.

Might have been 5 stars if you could actually hear your notifications without having to physically look at your phone. And even when you do get a messenger notification, after tapping on it, it shows nothing but the last message. You still have to use the actual messenger app to read new messages. Also, even after setting your feed to “most recent”, you get posts that were made hours and hours ago showing at the top. Sorry guys, great concept but I should have never paid for this. Until I can use FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser exclusively to check facebook and messenger, and actually see and hear my NEW notifications, I’m uninstalling. Enjoy my 2 bucks. 👍

FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser is great at keeping social media in one place. Easy to navigate, saves data... In really glad I got it! I just dislike that I sometimes can’t view all the pictures in Facebook albums and I can’t watch Lives, so I have to briefly download FB for that. I’ve never had issues with Instagram or Twitter, though, and FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser crashes less frequently than any of the social media apps even though it stores your navigation history for quite some time, like a browser. Fix the bugs, Friendly, and it’d be 5 stars from me. :)

UPDATE: Ok so my phone no longer gets hot while using FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser. I’ll give it 4 stars since I used the original Friendly app for years and was happy. ~ So I finally decided to bite the bullet and spend the 99 cents to get FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser so that I could have Facebook and messages in one place, now FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser is basically trying to cook my phone. I’m on a brand new iPhone 15 and FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser causes my phone to get extremely hot within seconds of using FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser . I sent a report to the developer, hopefully they will do something about it, I doubt I’m the only person affected. I will update this review if it’s fixed.

This is probably the best way to view your social media feeds. Although I’m a little confused what exactly is the difference between the plus, and the regular friendly app, I have both and they don’t seem to have any differential features. One issue they have that they need to address is notifications. When you receive a notification you get just a friendly notification with no information of which social media account it came from or even details about the notification. Because of this, they’re essentially useless and users should just turn them off. There is extremely disappointing as there is a lot of useful information from social media notifications.

I love FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser! It’s way better than FB official app by all margins. I don’t have notifications anymore that lead me back to the starting page, horrible search results, or unregistered clicks. For both FB and YT I really love how they made the user interface very old fashioned and the result is better usage of your screen space. The screen isn’t filled with lots of empty colored spaces. Because of the better use of screen space, it can be filled with more advanced menus and options and more text. I unfortunately can’t speak for users of smaller screen iPhones.

Been increasingly irritated with regular FB app changing my preferences every update, limited control of security profile, difficulty switching profiles. Searched App Store for alternatives when I realized that I had Friendly Plus already.

Very happy with the number of personalization options included along with the ability to go to Desktop version to access all controls of my profiles. Really happy with ability to switch between profiles. Have been using FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser almost exclusively for Facebook.

After having my accounts hacked, social engineered, and generally spammed, and reporting offensive posts daily to the platforms, I decided I had enough. I downloaded Friendly+ and didn’t look back.

This is an amazing app, where you can block words from your news feed, block the trackers that make it so easy to social engineer people, and see what you really want to see in your feed, the people and pages you care about.

The ad blocker is brilliant. Using the paid form of friendly is one of the best decisions I have ever made.

If you care about your right to privacy in the slightest, PAY $1.99 and DOWNLOAD NOW. I cannot express how thankful I am for this application. It graciously affords me the opportunity to continue using all of the Social Media applications that STRUGGLING with nearly leaving because of the amount of data and information being tracked and sold. These developers basically said “Yeah, NOPE. That’s not right.” And with FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser I’ve been able to stay connected to all of my accounts without a worry in mind. Seriously, the cost of $1.99 is NOTHING for the exchange of peace of mind. To the Dev’s, THANK YOU FOREVER!

I love the small footprint of FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser. I’ve had no problems accessing any Facebook features when using the Friendly app. A hint about enlarging your newsfeed, be sure that you’ve clicked on “follow” for each of your friends that you want added to your newsfeed page.
The ad blocking feature and screening posts by keyword are features that I really like. I’ve read some reviews saying that videos won’t post, trying to copy comments doesn’t work, it’s glitchy, and it’s slow. I’ve experienced none of these problems. In fact, I’ve found it much easier to locate older videos that I posted years ago, copying photos and text isn’t a problem, and Facebook Messenger functions great, without having to download an additional app.
Would I purchase FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser again, or recommend it to a friend? Absolutely!

I originally downloaded Friendly years ago and promptly forgot about. About a year ago i grew sick of waiting for the FB app to adopt split screen and work with the 12.9 iPad pro. I tried Friendly and was amazed by how customizable, powerful, and lightweight it is. I can use it with my iPad, but I love how well it works when traveling in parts of the world with slow internet connections. And the continued development of FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser is amazing. The dark mode, the ability to send articles to Instapaper or Pocket, the ad blocking. It all is incredible.

One great addition would be to have a “reading” mode similar to Safari when you open a link to an article.

Contact support for issues people! I've had this and other FB apps for years. None compare to this one. This continues to improve in substantial ways. First, ad block!! Works quietly in the background, doesn't slow anything down. Clean interface, seamless, very fast, easy nav, far more features than FB. Useful ones. Makes FB useful, much less tedious and less frustrating.

I just discovered a feature that sent me back here to rewrite my review - you can export/save/open articles you visit from links into other apps. Stellar!!! That saves me TONS of hassle and time. I look forward to FB now.

Thank you devs for a great app, for maintaining and improving it for so long.

I love how there are more options to share things in Friendly, especially with myself, to save things I like. I appreciate how easy it is to check on my kids’ Facebook feeds to see what they and others are posting.

I like how things don’t suddenly change without notice; the developers are always very good about sharing specific changes, which are always an improvement.

I don’t feel like the Friendly team has an agenda or that I’m a guinea pig to experiment on. I have a lot more trust for them than the Facebook corporation and appreciate the buffer they provide between me and the annoying changes the Facebook developers make.

What first attracted me to Friendly was that I could have the option of having my feed show posts from any of my friends, even seldom contacted ones, as they were posted, with none pushed to the top. I’ve been able to feel connected with more of my friends because of this feature.

Thank you, Friendly team, for making my experience on Facebook less jarring and irritating and so much more enjoyable!

If you care about your right to privacy in the slightest, PAY $1.99 and DOWNLOAD NOW. I cannot express how thankful I am for this application. It graciously affords me the opportunity to continue using all of the Social Media applications that STRUGGLING with nearly leaving because of the amount of data and information being tracked and sold. These developers basically said “Yeah, NOPE. That’s not right.” And with FriendlyPlusSocialBrowser I’ve been able to stay connected to all of my accounts without a worry in mind. Seriously, the cost of $1.99 is NOTHING for the exchange of peace of mind. To the Dev’s, THANK YOU FOREVER!