Next Evolution of Facebook Platform for Mobile

Today, we are hosting our Mobile Developer Conference in New York City, where we’re introducing the next evolution of Facebook Platform for mobile. Our mobile SDKs have already had a significant impact on developers by making it easier and faster to build great social apps — but that was just the beginning.

We’re launching three important products that further our transition to a mobile-first platform. We’re making it easier to implement Open Graph on mobile, improving Facebook Login, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS. We’re also announcing a new partner program to help developers integrate Facebook on a variety of mobile platforms.

More than 81% of top 100 grossing iOS apps and 70% of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook. With the new tools we’re unveiling today, we’re excited to see even more high quality mobile apps integrate with Facebook to engage with our 680+ million mobile users.

Open Graph goes mobile

We’re pleased to announce new APIs and features that make it easier to integrate Open Graph into your mobile apps, allowing more people to tell their stories on mobile.

Object API – no web server needed

In the past, we heard that object creation made it a challenge to integrate Open Graph into your mobile apps. With the Object API, you can directly create Open Graph objects and no longer need to host webpages with Open Graph tags. This API is available for both mobile and web apps. In addition, we’re rolling out the Object Browser, a simple visual interface that helps you easily interact with the object data you publish.

The current public object model makes it harder for certain categories of apps to use Open Graph. To solve this, we’re introducing an object privacy model to improve sharing for user generated content. With support for object privacy, user owned objects make it easier for people to tell their stories from mobile devices.

Learn more about getting started with the new APIs.

Native Share Dialog

The native Share Dialog is simple to integrate and significantly improves people’s sharing experiences from your native mobile app. It has built-in support for publishing Open Graph actions. In addition, people now have the option to share activity from apps through this dialog without needing to login to Facebook first. This makes it faster and easier for people to share.

The native Share Dialog offers a lightweight and consistent way to enable sharing on native mobile apps. Similar to the Like button, you can create engaging sharing experiences with just one line of code.

The native Share Dialog will be available today in limited beta for iOS apps, and we’re currently working on enabling it for Android.

Improved mobile login experience

We're rolling out faster mobile login dialogs that have been redesigned to give people greater clarity and control of their app permissions.

User-friendly permission model

In December, we started moving to a more user-friendly permission model that moves the publishing permission to an optional dialog. The new model has already shown a 5% increase in mobile conversions and you can further optimize login conversion rates by minimizing the permissions that you ask for upfront. Going forward, apps will need to request data and publishing permissions separately and appropriately.

Faster Login Dialog

We’ve completely rebuilt our Login Dialogs across mobile and web with a focus on performance. The new dialogs load up to 20% faster on mobile. Starting today, all mobile and non-game web apps will be automatically upgraded to the new dialogs with no change required to your code. You can take advantage of the even faster native Login Dialog through our latest iOS and Android SDKs.

Learn more about getting started with the Login Dialog.

Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS

We’re pleased to announce a major update to the Facebook SDK for iOS that adds support for the Object API, native Share Dialog and native Login Dialog. We’ve updated our iOS Dev Center so you can quickly access the tools and resources you need to build great social apps. The latest SDK supports iOS 5.0 and above.

Download the SDK now.

More developer SDKs, plugins and tools

Finally, we’re announcing the Facebook Technology Partners program to help a wide range of mobile developers take advantage of these new products across a variety of platforms. These partners offer technical solutions that include SDKs, plugins, tools and services to help developers build great social apps.

The initial list of partners includes:

• C# SDK for Windows 8 by Microsoft
• Corona SDK by Corona Labs
• Kinvey
• Node.js by Thuzi
• Parse SDK by Parse
• PhoneGap by Adobe
• Sencha Touch by Sencha
• StackMob SDK by StackMob
• Trigger.io SDK by Trigger.io
• Unity Social Networking Plugin by Prime31
• WinJS by Thuzi

We’re excited to get these products into your hands and believe they will enable you to build great mobile experiences.