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Chronicles

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Introducing the App Center

Today, we're announcing the App Center, a new place for people to find social apps.  The App Center gives developers an additional way to grow their apps and creates opportunities for more types of apps to be successful.  —  In the coming weeks …

Facebook Developer Blog Aaron Brady

Context & Ripple Effects

This announcement closes a loop Facebook opened five years earlier, when its platform triggered an app feeding frenzy among developers chasing viral distribution through the news feed — a gold rush VCs formally underwrote with Bay Partners' AppFactory fund. What was missing then was a durable storefront: discovery ran through feed noise rather than a browsable destination.

First-order effects

  • Developers gain a second growth channel beyond feed virality, and per the VentureBeat framing it spans all devices, all platforms, and paid as well as free apps — widening which kinds of apps can find an audience on Facebook.

Second-order effects

  • Apple's device-centric store infrastructure, already formalized on the developer side by its App Store Resource Center, now faces a rival whose discovery layer is the social graph rather than the handset — pressuring both to treat curation and developer tooling as competitive surfaces.

Third-order effects

  • If storefront-style discovery becomes the norm on social platforms, app economics shift toward whoever owns the ranking algorithm — repeating on Facebook the consolidation of distribution power that followed Apple's move into developer resources.

The trend: App distribution is consolidating around platform-owned storefronts, with Facebook extending the store model from device makers to social graphs.

Related: App Center: A New Place to Find Social Apps · Facebook's app feeding frenzy · Bay Partners Kicks Off AppFactory for Facebook Apps · Apple Introduces App Store Resource Center for iPhone Developers

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