New FbStart Partners, New Way to Share

Earlier this year, we kicked off the FbStart World Tour with plans to visit over 20 cities, to hear direct feedback from developers and to teach them about the tools we offer to build, grow and monetize their apps. Today at our biggest event, FbStart San Francisco, we are announcing seven new FbStart partners, and we are introducing an update on share sheet, a new way for people to share content from apps that is rolling out on iOS starting today.

New FbStart Partners

FbStart members now have more tools to build better products and accelerate their growth thanks to benefits from the following new partners: Animoto, Coursera, Dropbox, Reverie, Twilio, Twin Prime, and VerbalizeIt. With a total of 30+ FbStart partners, developers enrolled in the program get access to industry-leading tools to create better, more connected app experiences, promote their apps, enter new markets, collaborate better, and continue learning as they grow.

FbStart Growth

The community of developers enrolled in FbStart continues to grow rapidly; there are now more than 7,200 startups spread across more than 130 countries in the program since last year's launch. Our goal with FbStart has always been to help scale support and provide mentoring to thousands of startups, so we're encouraged to see entrepreneurs and developers joining the program from all over the world. Over 70% of program members are from outside the U.S. and, as we have noted before, non-U.S. developers are contributing significantly to FbStart's growth. For example, after the United States, India is our largest market for FbStart members.

If you're a developer interested in applying to join FbStart, please visit our website and check out our video, below.

A New Way to Share

We want to make it easier for people to share great content from apps, and to provide the right tools for developers to build good social sharing experiences. A simpler sharing experience makes it easier for people to share things that interest them, which leads to more engagement and referral traffic for apps. At F8 this year, we previewed a new share sheet that provides an easier and more consistent sharing experience for people using apps.

Today, we're starting to roll out a new version of the share sheet to iOS apps that use the iOS share extension. It includes a clearer preview of the content you're sharing on Facebook, a more prominent way to control who can see your post, and new ways to tag friends or add feelings to a post.

Since F8, we've been testing versions of the share sheet to incorporate feedback from people and developers. We learned that people want a simple experience that takes them directly to the composer after they click “Share,” shows a clear preview of what they're sharing, and allows them to complete the share quickly in just a few steps.

Here's how you can implement the new share sheet in your app:

• If your app already uses the Facebook share extension for iOS, you don't need to make any changes. People who use your app will start to see the new experience starting today.
• If your app doesn't yet use the Facebook share extension, but you want to implement the new sharing experience, see the documentation here.

This new experience makes sharing things from apps to Facebook even easier for people, in turn helping developers to grow their apps. We'll continue to test and iterate on this experience to make it even better. Let us know what you think!