Platform Updates: A new way to drive installs to apps on Facebook and an updated Android SDK.

Today we launched Facebook ads to allow you to effectively drive and measure installs for your desktop apps on Facebook (canvas apps). We also released a new Android SDK with feature improvements and bug fixes.

Introducing ads to drive installs to your app on Facebook

The new ads will appear in both News Feed and the right hand column of Facebook's website. The ads will have a strong call to action such as "Play Now" or "Use Now" and a large engaging image to show off your app to people. Each user that clicks on the ad will be taken directly to your app on Facebook to accept your app's permission. With this ad, you will be able to measure installs and continually optimize your ads based on its performance.

Get started driving installs to your desktop app

You can get access to desktop app ads through Ads Create Tool, Power Editor, or by working with one of our Preferred Marketing Developers. In our ads interfaces, simply select the objective you want to achieve, "App installs" for desktop apps. Then add your custom creative and select your placement options (News Feed and/or right hand column). Finally set your targeting preferences and place your bid.

Today, we launched to 10% of advertisers in our ads interfaces, and will roll-out to 100% of advertisers in the next several days. Go to our tutorial for step by step guidance on how to run these ads.

Android SDK 3.6

We released an updated version of our Android SDK that includes several feature improvements and bug fixes. These include:

• AppEventsLogger is now out of Beta
• Ability to set the selection property of the FriendPickerFragment that makes it easy to pre-select friends.
• Added support for Gradle and Android Studio.

For more details and a list of other updates in this release, visit our change log. You can download the SDK here.