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Android app surpasses iPhone on Facebook

Number of average daily users turning to the Android app to access the social network exceeds the number using the iPhone app, according to AppData numbers.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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For the first time ever, Android is being used more frequently than iPhone to access Facebook.

Facebook for Android has 58.3 million average daily users compared with an average of 57.4 million daily users who access the social network via an iPhone app, according to stats complied by AppData.

The Android app, which was released in September 2009--a full year after the iPhone app--still trails the iPhone in monthly average users accessing Facebook, tallying 85.4 million users to the iPhone app's 99.1 million. However, the monthly user data doesn't reflect the "stickiness" of the daily user data, or the number of users who return on a daily basis. In that measurement, the Android app's 68.2 percent still leads over the iPhone app's 57.9 percent.

One explanation for the leadership change could be the fact that more than 550,000 devices are being activated every day--up from a daily tally of 500,000 in June and 400,000 in May. More than 200 million Android devices have now been activated around the world, Google announced last month.