Facebook pushes App Center with easy app installs
The social network announces that it is making it easier for developers to submit apps and for users to download apps with App Center.
With mobile as Facebook's financial Achilles heel, the company continues to drum up hype around its forthcoming App Center for mobile apps. The company announced today that it is making it easier for developers to place their apps on Facebook and is also helping users install apps via a mobile device or computer.
"Facebook sends over 160 million people to mobile apps each month through news feed and timeline," Facebook software engineer Brent Goldman wrote in a blog post today. "Soon, with the App Center, it will be easier than ever to drive mobile app installs and reach the over 500 million people using Facebook on mobile devices."
The social network boasts that currently seven of the top 10 grossing iOS apps and five of the top 10 Android apps have integrated with Facebook. According to the company, all mobile apps with a Facebook login are eligible to be listed in the App Center. Obviously, this gives incentive to developers to integrate a Facebook login on their apps, and in turn the social network could get even more users.
Facebook announced the App Center at the beginning of this month and said it plans to begin rolling it out in coming weeks. CNET's Rafe Needleman points out that the idea of this App Center is clever since the social network doesn't have its own operating system.
"It gets to promote social apps that use Facebook login (a requirement to be listed on the App Center), and the more users Facebook has using its network, even if only the login feature of it, the more data Facebook has on its users and the more targeted its advertising can be," Needleman wrote when the company announced the App Center.
Here are Goldman's instructions for installing apps from a computer to a smartphone:
We've also built a convenient mobile install flow for people browsing the App Center on their computer. All apps built for iOS, Android, and the mobile web have a "Send to Mobile" button on their app detail page.Once people click "Send to Mobile," they're logged into your app and we immediately send a Facebook notification to their mobile device. By clicking the notification, they'll be redirected to your mobile web app or the respective install page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.