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+--- Thread: Facebook is from Japan? (/thread-104313.html)
Facebook is from Japan? - Samuel - 02-24-2014 09:54 PM
What does Katana means on Facebook package and process name. If i backup Facebook on Android, the package name is com.facebook.katana, but the app title is Facebook. And sometimes if you are click a photo in Facebook on browser, the link appear as Akamai-hd blah blah blah, Akamai's website is English,but Looks like japanese lol
- Anisur - 02-24-2014 10:02 PM
Wow! This Question is great, I also waiting for best answer.
- ReB94 - 02-24-2014 10:09 PM
Copied off Quora.com :
Question : Why is the Facebook package name in Android called katana (com.facebook.katana)?
Answer by a guy named Charles Wu who now works at Twitter : I was the one who named the package Katana as the first Program Manager/Product Manager of the first official Facebook for Android app so I'll share a little history.
After internal beta period and we were prepping to upload to "Android Market" (not Play at the time), it turned out that we could not call the package com.facebook.facebook for reasons that escape me now. So we needed sometime that would identify it over time.
I received the change request while I was eating dinner at sushi restaurant called "Katana". Though that wasn't the first name that came to mind. The original idea was calling the package "Cortana" which was the name of the tasks application used at Facebook at the time (and has ended up being the core of Asana). Cortana comes from Halo.
That name was pulled on the remote chance that we ended up publishing a front end for the tool on Android so we decided against that. There might have been some concern that it would have issues with copyright too, but that I don't remember. Since I was at the restaurant, "Katana" sounded close enough to "Cortana" we decided to use that after thinking about the meaning of katana and what it represented.
Katana has the symbolic association of being something sharp and would cut through what it encountered and additionally that the app had multiple layers similar to how the katana sword is created by repeated folding an pounding creating thousands of layers.
For those reasons, I and the lead developer went forward with calling the package com.facebook.katana when it was submitted.