Facebook Makes Android Apps More Viral With Social Discovery

Facebook has been in the process of ramping up its effort to leverage its ever-growing platform to aid mobile developers to market their native and HTML5-based apps. In this attempt to extend its platform on mobile, Facebook brought its social channels and social app discovery to mobile web apps on Android and native apps on iOS. With a new update to Facebook for Android, the social network today announced that it is bringing social discovery to native Android apps.

In a blog post today, Facebook said that apps and games like Pinterest, BranchOut, Diamond Dash, and Words With Friends have seen a spike in traffic to their native iOS apps and Android web apps through Facebook. Thus, with this release social app discovery for native apps is available on both Android and iOS.

The update, Facebook says, will make it easier for people on Facebook to discover and re-engage with their favorite apps on mobile devices, presumably driving additional growth for Android apps. This means that channels like Bookmarks, Requests, and News Feed, which have previously been available on other platforms, are now accessible on native Android apps. To date, 7 of the top 10 iOS apps and 5 of the top 10 grossing Android apps (like Live Holdem Poker Pro, Zynga Poker, Slot City, Slotomania, and Draw Something) are integrated with Facebook.

In case it’s not clear from the above, Facebook now enables developers to build apps for the mobile platform of their choice, and to take advantage of the social discovery and increased traffic brought through viral channels. For developers, once a mobile optimized version of an app is ready to go (with Facebook Single Sign On), head over to app settings, and enable “Android Native Deep Linking,” and fill in the form. You can find the documentation here.

For more, check out the blog post here.