Facebook finally lands in the Android Market
We thought the official Facebook application was launching last month, but it never appeared. That was until today, when it quietly rolled out to the Android Market. Android users can finally download version 1.0 of Facebook for Android.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's official Android client has been a running punchline since July, when TechCrunch reported that Facebook and Google were actually working together on an Android app — a partnership notable mainly because the two companies rarely cooperate. The promised August launch slipped, and Android users were left with no first-party option.
The gap mattered because it was widening: Facebook shipped its revamped 3.0 iPhone app through Apple's App Store review just under two weeks ago, leaving Android owners on unofficial clients while iOS users got video uploads and a redesigned home screen. Today's quiet release of version 1.0 in the Android Market finally gives Google's platform an official Facebook presence.
First-order effects
- Android users can now download an official Facebook client from the Android Market instead of relying on third-party or browser-based access, closing the most visible app-catalog gap against the iPhone.
- Facebook now maintains two parallel native codebases — the feature-rich 3.0 iPhone build and this bare-bones Android 1.0 — splitting its mobile engineering effort between platforms of very different maturity.
Second-order effects
- Unofficial Android Facebook clients lose their core selling point, forcing their developers to differentiate or abandon the niche as the free official app absorbs demand.
- A marquee social app strengthens the Android Market's storefront pitch at a moment when Distimo's research shows Android buyers skewing toward tools and applications — helping Google argue the catalog is filling in beyond early-adopter utilities.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — iOS getting flagship social clients months ahead of Android — platform ranking for developers will track where each network's daily engagement lands, making official app availability a competitive lever between handset ecosystems rather than an afterthought.
- Social networks committing to native builds on every major OS points toward mobile apps displacing the mobile web as the default Facebook surface, with each platform's API rules becoming a gate Facebook must clear per release.
The trend: Major social networks are racing to ship native clients on every smartphone OS, and the staggered timing of those launches is becoming one of the ways platform ecosystems are measured against each other.