Hello dear Apple and Google (well, and Microsoft too I guess)! There’s a new app marketplace in town and although it will work with you (for the time being), it also threatens to break your hegemony over the applications industry. Facebook’s App Center is now live!
About a month after Facebook initially announced it is about to launch its own apps portal which will consolidate all the Facebook apps in one place, last night Facebook posted it is now operational and includes more than 600 apps for the web or for mobile devices.
As Facebook stated before, the App Center’s homepage is showing personalized app recommendations designed for each and every user based on his/her social graph on the main left column and apps that the user’s friends used recently are displayed on the main right column.
Below the two main columns, the user will find the Top Rated, Trending and Top Grossing apps. On the left sidebar, the user can filter the apps appears for web or mobile only apps and to choose apps based on category (games, sports, utilities, etc).
Facebook also shared some interesting statistics alongside the launch announcement:
- More than 230 million people play games on Facebook every month.
- More than 130 games on Facebook have more than 1 million monthly active users.
- More than 4,500 timeline apps have launched since f8 in September 2011.
- Facebook drove people to the Apple App Store 83 million times in May.
- Facebook drove people to iOS apps 134 million times in May (someone who already has the app and is directed back to it from Facebook).
- As of May, seven of the top 10 grossing iOS apps and six of the top 10 Android apps have integrated with Facebook.
It seems to me that Facebook doesn’t really want to upset the big app marketplace players and especially not Apple which according to the recent whispers, Facebook suppose to integrate deeper within iOS 6. This Facebook-iOS integration can turn out to be a great growth and engagement booster.
Therefore, Facebook is trying to ease the launch of its App Center by saying to Apple: “Don’t worry, we are not against you, look how many people we sends you every month…” That is, until Facebook will be confident enough to keep all those people for itself… But that just me speculating here.
Anyways, the App Center can be a serious traffic accelerator for app developers. However, Facebook is stating that only high-quality apps will be included inside and not every app will be accepted. To learn how to add your app to the App Center, follow the instructions on this tutorial.
