THIS IS SPARTA!!!! Facebook Conquers Mobile

Some of you may have read our post about Facebook’s ‘Project Spartan’. As you have probably heard already or seen, Facebook’s quest to conquer the mobile territory has begun (last week!).

Some of you may have read our post about Facebook’s ‘Project Spartan’. As you have probably heard already or seen, Facebook’s quest to conquer the mobile territory has begun (last week).

Originally, we were anticipating a web app following a report from TechCrunch a few weeks ago, but what we got instead was a native iOS iPad app and a significant upgrade of the existing iPhone and iPod Touch versions. Many big publishers and companies have opted for web apps to avoid Apple’s strict control over the App Store, such as The Financial Times, so it was a surprise to many that Facebook didn’t go down this route. The reasoning was explained by Luke Shepard, a software development engineer at Facebook, in a blog post titled ‘Bringing social app discovery to mobile’. He stated that “the best social apps will be on both native iOS and web apps, and we encourage you to think about how to reach the total audience of Facebook users by building both.”

But the main new feature of the iOS apps is Facebook’s application platform now being mobile-friendly. This diverts attention away from the fact that the iPad never had an official Facebook app until last week, so users had to use third-party apps such as MyPad+ (which offers certain features that Facebook’s official app doesn’t).

To bring the ‘social app experience’ to the 100 million mobile Facebook users, the new Facebook apps have a new tab called ‘Bookmarks’ to list all of the user’s installed Facebook apps. When users click on each app, they will be directed to the native iOS version of the app on their phone or the device’s App Store.  Examples include several Zynga games, Instagram and Flixter.  Users will also receive all Facebook application notifications on their news feed, something that was only available on the desktop version of the site.

Due to certain Apple policies, Facebook Credits cannot be used in iOS apps or web apps that run within the iOS app. This has not raised any eyebrows, as Apple likes to have full control over its ecosystem, something Android has allowed Facebook to implement.  

What does this mean?

Facebook users will now have a more consistent and unified experience whilst on any version of Facebook on any platform.  The entry of the Facebook application platform to iOS is likely to encourage Facebook game and app developers to build their software to support mobile devices, opening up a new form of interaction that was previously exclusive to desktop users.  Many game and app developers have already converted their apps to support HTML5; a selection of them can be viewed here.

It’s clear that Facebook has to abide by Apple’s rules if it wants to tap into the rapidly growing 100 million plus mobile user base, but it will only be a matter of time until the social networking company will have enough of a presence to dictate the rules.   

You can download the Facebook app in the iTunes App Store here.