2012 in Review

On behalf of everyone at Facebook, I want to thank all of the developers who build with us. We’re proud of your successes and are looking forward to a great 2013. Before we head into the holidays, let’s take a look at what we've accomplished together in 2012.

Products and Programs

This year was about improving app discovery and driving growth for high quality apps through new products and programs.

• Open Graph launched to all developers and expanded beyond music, news and video
• Location and friend tagging became available to enhance Open Graph stories
• The Preferred Marketing Developer program and Preferred Marketing Developer Center brought marketers more ways to integrate their apps and campaigns with Facebook Platform
• The App Center launched as a new discovery and distribution channel on web and mobile
• App quality Insights gave you more ways to monitor the health of your app activity
• Subscriptions and local currency pricing created more options for building a business on Facebook
• The World Hack brought the global developer community together in cities around the world to build social apps
• Open Graph shifted to explicitly shared actions to better reflect how people interact with apps and match their expectations
• The Notifications API brought a requested 1:1 communication channel to developers with high quality apps
• Developer Alerts gave you more ways to receive updates and monitor the health of your apps
• Auto-generated documentation makes our documentation more accurate, complete and up-to-date over time

Extending Platform to Mobile

As we’ve brought the same growth channels from web to mobile, we saw more mobile apps than ever build with Facebook. More than 200,000 iOS and Android apps are integrated with Facebook, including more than 45% of the top 400 grossing iOS apps. This is just the beginning of what we can do to drive mobile app installs and help people re-engage with your iOS and Android apps, and mobile websites.

• Improved app distribution on iOS to provide optimal user experiences
• Early mobile app success stories showed what’s possible by using Facebook’s growth channels in mobile
• App discovery channels for Android went native
• Facebook SDK 3.0 for iOS and Facebook for iOS 6 opened significant new opportunities to build and grow social mobile apps
• Mobile app install ads and enhancements introduced new ways to accelerate growth and measure mobile installs
• Facebook SDK 3.0 for Android came out of beta and provided native UI controls, simplified session management and better API support

Growing the Games Ecosystem

This was a big year for social games, as we saw greater diversity than ever before in genres, regions and platforms. Games on Facebook.com reached more than 250 million monthly active users, and the user base also grew across top social mobile apps on iOS and Android. As the longest standing and largest app category on Facebook, we continued to build game-specific infrastructure to support a growing and diverse games ecosystem on both Facebook.com and mobile.

The launch of the App Center reinforced our commitment to driving distribution to high quality games. The bar for quality rose as new categories, including arcade and core, grew in popularity, key themes that Alex Shultz, Director of Growth and Sean Ryan, Director of Games Partnerships recentlyaddressed. International developers reached a global audience with hits such as SongPop, Candy Crush Saga, Dragon City, and Clash of Clans, as the number of developers outside of the U.S. was higher than ever before.

As social game usage and development increases, we’ve transitioned our Platform to mobile to help mobile games grow in the same way games on Facebook.com have grown for years – by powering social distribution and discovery.

Key themes, community news, and products from the year included:

• Improvements to game discovery and distribution created more opportunities for game developers
• We connected with the global games community at GDC San Francisco and GDC Europe
• We closed out the year with our list of top rated social games
• Director of Games Partnerships Sean Ryan on the state of the games ecosystem (part 1 | part 2)
• Top game developers discussed with Gamasutra the future of social game development on Facebook.com and mobile

Developer Highlights

2012 was the year we saw apps from all types of verticals take off, with great momentum in:

• Fashion
• Fitness
• Social good
• Music

Let's continue building great things together in 2013.