A long time ago when iOS dev tools were immature Joe Hewitt created https://github.com/facebook/three20. I can't find the source, but somewhere Joe is quoted that so many of the early Facebook application reviews were about how so much of it was derivative.
There is absolutely a place for this kind of library and if you pay enough attention to the details (sweat every pixel and animation) I fully believe that you can achieve an experience that would be completely indistinguishable from iOS.
Notes:
1. For this to work you should be using something like Ember as your front-end framework, not jQuery Mobile.
2. I'm not pushing this as dogma, I'm just very glad that it exists within the ecosystem.
In Framework 7 – Building native iOS apps in HTML5facebookarchive
three20
Objective-C2009–2014
facebookarchive / three20 · Archived
three20
Three20 is an Objective-C library for iPhone developers
18Distinct people
20Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.2KGitHub stars
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What it is
Three20 is an Objective-C library for iPhone developers
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Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year20 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2009-11-20 19:30:39 UTC to 2014-03-21 15:24:06 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 2009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 1 | 10 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
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Archived Repo
This is an archived project and is no longer supported or updated by Facebook. Please do not file issues or pull-requests against this repo. If you wish to continue to develop this code yourself, we recommend you fork it.
Proceed and be bold!
Three20
What now?
If you updated to this revision by accident (e.g. a git pull), you might want to switch back to the
version you had before (git checkout cc672132ab).
Three20 still compiles and seems to work on iOS6, so there's no immediate need to remove everything now.
Still, as the library is not maintained anymore, it might be a good time to replace it.
Lots of Three20's helpers are not needed anymore, as they are now present right in iOS.
For other parts there are some really good replacement available.
If you're searching for a full replacement, NimbusKit might help, they even provide a migration guide.
Links
Three20 Mailing List
Three20 Tagged Questions on StackOverflow
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
20 sourcesThree20 - an Objective-C library for iPhone developers
1 points · Open discussionThree20 is an Objective-C library for iPhone developers
2 points · Open discussionHmm, they're not using the native UITableView animation for editing, but that doesn't mean it's HTML. It's just clunky animation, mostly because each cell is doing a lot of drawing translation due to it all being three20. Also, the "see more posts" cell at the bottom is a TTTableMoreButtonCell (https://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/src/Three20U...) I believe.
I know that Facebook is very pro-HTML5 but I don't think there are any views in the native iPhone app that are not native UIKit or based on three20. I'll ask around, would be nice to now if there's any shared code at all on their end.
In Write your app in HTML5, upload it and get back app-store ready appsThree20: a collection of iPhone UI classes
12 points · Open discussionHow does this project compare to the three320 project originally started by Joe Hewitt from Facebook? 320 seems to have more features:
https://github.com/facebook/three20/
In IOS Boilerplate: A base template for iOS appsThree20: An Objective-C library for iPhone developers from Facebook
2 points · Open discussionIt's nothing more than Jeff Verkoeyen being the gatekeeper for the project's repo, the same way a tightly controlled SVN repo might be. He's supposed to review every line of code that goes into it, and the commit it himself.
But everyone knows thats a daunting task, and theres no reason to review a simple thing like this to question where it originally came from. Right?
Git is awesome, because it helps prevent these situations, but it's only a tool. Different people will use it differently, and based on the comments of the blog post, once he found out that it was copyrighted code, he rectified the problem. http://github.com/facebook/three20/commit/204673eea141acf4ee...
I'm not trying to pass blame, but I do believe that jverkoey never had the intention of stealing this code. None the less, Facebook.app ended up on the sour end of a situat
Read the rest
ion they could have solved months ago, but they had no idea there was a problem until now.
I'm David Recordon and head up our open source programs at Facebook. I'd like to point out Jeff Verkoeyen's comment about where this specific piece of code came from. http://developers.enormego.com/view/what-happened-common-cou...
Back in February a developer outside of Facebook sent a GitHub pull request which included this pull to refresh functionality. At the time we believed that the developer wrote the code themselves and thus didn't realize that it actually came from Shaun's open source library EGOTableViewPullRefresh. I'm sorry that we messed this one up. Three20 has over a dozen different contributors (http://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/AUTHORS) and we try really hard to give credit where it is due.
As for fixing this, the code clearly came from EGOTableViewPullRefresh and we're updating the four file's within Three20
Read the rest
to directly reflect that and link back to Shaun's project. This patch will be pushed to GitHub shortly.
While it isn't the most well known address, please always feel free to email opensource@facebook.com or me directly at davidrecordon@facebook.com.
I take that back: There are rare commits such as http://github.com/facebook/three20/commit/807dbda1c8cb85f09b... which explicitly credit an author for the patch.
<del>I hate to say it, but the current system (i.e. all commits through jverkoey) has the major drawback of putting code accountability in nobody's hands but Joey's.</del>
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Rescinded: http://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/CHANGES#L93
In Facebook iPhone app takes OSS code without attributionInitial commit: http://github.com/facebook/three20/commit/0edd0ca58bf3b352e7...
jverkoey looks to have implemented this himself.
Actually, looking back through the network graph (http://github.com/facebook/three20/network) and commit log (http://github.com/facebook/three20/commits/master) there really aren't ANY credits regarding merged-in patches or other contributions.
In Facebook iPhone app takes OSS code without attributionI agree that implementation-wise, there are probably only so many ways to do this.
While the overall algorithm is basically the same (see http://github.com/facebook/three20/commit/0edd0ca58bf3b352e7... versus http://github.com/enormego/EGOTableViewPullRefresh/blob/mast... ), I'll give the Three20 folks credit for cleaning their implementation up into a view+delegate system.
It's a bold claim to say that your particular implementation has been "taken" when this sort of open idea and algorithm reuse happens all the time. In this situation, I'm sure once the dust clears credit will be given where it's due.
Tangent: Who wants to guess that some of the HN commenters up-in-arms about this are some of the folks who are cry foul about software patents?
In Facebook iPhone app takes OSS code without attributionThe three20 code has shuffled around a lot in the last 8 months or so, but if you look at the change log here http://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/CHANGES#L93 you can see that the maintainer, Jeff (who was a college student at the time and has worked his butt off on three20) is thanking a 3rd party for contributing that code.
There's attribution for other code in three20, so I think it's safe to say that Jeff didn't know.
It's also possible that there was simply a miscommunication somewhere along the chain. I wouldn't assume this is anyone being evil or devious until we hear the full story, and I expect the lack of attribution will be fixed quickly.
In Facebook iPhone app takes OSS code without attributionStop spreading FUD. iPhone devs would not have licensing issues. How about I point you to a number of frameworks that iPhone developers ship with today and have been shipping with since near day one.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_iPhone_SDK
http://code.google.com/p/gdata-objectivec-client/
http://github.com/facebook/three20
http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/
http://code.google.com/p/oolongengine/
http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/
In Android developer on Slashdot detailing the Android "fragmentation"The newly modularized Three20 library
26 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 20 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.