On Monday, Jeff Verkoeyen, Facebook's lead iPad app engineer, announced on his blog that he had quit Facebook and moved to Google.
Verkoeyen wrote that he was "frustrated" with working 80 hours a week on a project whose launch date kept being pushed back without explanation. Though his blog was down at the time of this writing, TechCrunch wrote that Verkoeyen said the iPad app has been "feature-complete" since May.
In July, TechCrunch released screenshots of what appeared to be a polished Facebook app for iPad. Verkoeyen's blog post confirmed that TechCrunch's pictures were indeed of the app he had been working on.
"It is now nearly 5 months since the app was feature complete and I haven't seen it released except for when the project was leaked on Techcrunch [sic]," Verkoeyen wrote, per TechCrunch. "Needless to say this was a frustrating experience for me. The experience of working on this app was a large contribution to the reasons why I left Facebook, though that doesn't mean it wasn't a difficult decision."
It was rumored that Facebook's iPad app would be announced at the social network's recent F8 conference. However, that never happened.
While Verkoeyen didn't say for sure what has caused the app's delay, he worried that the app "may never be released," according to a quote taken from his blog post by Business Insider.
Business Insider surmises that the delay could have something to do with Facebook's rumored tensions with Apple or the social network's struggles with its mobile division as a whole.
It's also been rumored that Facebook has been building a web app platform (codenamed Project Spartan, according to TechCrunch) that could swipe at Apple's dominance in the mobile app space.
Mashable reports that Facebook's iPad app might launch next week. According to Mashable's tipster, the announcement will take place at a rumored event on October 4, which many expect will revolve mostly around the announcement of the iPhone 5. But nothing about that event (not even its date) is official yet.
Meanwhile, Facebook's iPhone app remains a favorite among users. In January 2011, the app appeared at the top of iTunes's list of the most popular free apps of all time. A Facebook-made iPad app could possibly follow suit.
In a CNBC interview on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered no clues about the app's feature set or its release date.