Facebook Launches App Center

The App Centre will be rolled out over the coming weeks and aims to display the finest Ios, Android, mobile and web apps.

Facebook’s ambition is to help people discover “the best apps” which their friends enjoy using.The social network, which now has more than 900 million members, will also sell its own apps through the store. The move is being seen as a shrewd one by technology analysts because the App Centre will allow the social network to showcase the best apps, based on its extensive social data, which allow users to login using their Facebook details via Connect.

And it will also encourage more developers to create bespoke paid-for apps for Facebook.com. All developers who create paid-for apps solely created for Facebook, will have to share 30 per cent of the price with the social network.
However, when promoting popular apps such as Spotify or Pinterest, Facebook’s App Centre will simply list which stores they are available through – without taking a cut of the price.

“For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga,” explained Facebook engineer Aaron Brady on the company blog. “Everything has an app detail page, which helps people see what makes an app unique and lets them install it before going to an app.

“Success through the App Centre is tied to the quality of an app. We use a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement, to determine if an app is listed in the App Centre. To help you [developers] monitor user feedback, we are also introducing a new app ratings metric in Insights to report how users rate your app over time.

“Well-designed apps that people enjoy will be prominently displayed. Apps that receive poor user ratings or don’t meet the quality guidelines won’t be listed.”

Each app will have a star rating, based on Facebook’s social graph, like Apple’s App Store.The news comes just ahead of Facebook’s highly anticipated initial public offering.

Courtesy : telegraph.co.uk