Apps Tech News

It was rolled out a month ago to impressive fanfare in the US – now, Facebook’s App Center has been released worldwide.

Well, not completely ‘worldwide’, but seven other countries with a combined population of 1.38 billion is still a fairly hefty number.

The vast majority of that number comes from India, with various other English-speaking nations included in this week’s rollout including Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

For Facebook users in those countries, the App Center is now easily accessible in the left hand pane (see left).

Anyone got a spare dictionary?

Facebook also announced a localisation tool for developers wishing to give translated details on their app.

According to Facebook, the intuitive tool will be language specific dependent on the user viewing the app – for instance, if an app has supportive translated text in Spanish, the translated text will be shown to Spanish users.

Facebook developer Drew Hoskins explained on the company’s developer blog: “Approximately 80% of our monthy active users are outside of the US and Canada, so we’re starting to make the App Center more available globally”.

This development is all very good; however the difficult bit will come with the rolling out of App Center to Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey in the coming weeks.

Facebook has stated that apps from these countries need to be sent – with translated details – as soon as possible.

The apps sent to Facebook by July 13 will be prioritised to ensure the global Center is stocked adequately.

Healthy competition

Facebook’s reason for bringing out an App Center is clear: it not only strengthens the alliance between the social media giant and third-party app developers; it also pushes Facebook further into the mobile arena.

This increased roll-out comes at a similar time to the news that BlackBerry’s App World store has passed three billion downloads.

After announcing that the BlackBerry 10 was being delayed again until early next year, this would be welcome good news for RIM, whose BlackBerry community has taken three years for App World to pass the 3bn mark.

To compare, the App Store took roughly 18 months to pass 3bn downloads, while Google Play took 27 months to hit the magical mark.

Evidently Facebook would like to tap into some of these numbers, but is there a gap in the market with their hosting and recommending of other apps? Facebook has always been about the social, after all.

Do you think Facebook has found the gap in the market with their app store? Even though Facebook isn’t making any money from the recommendations, is it only a matter of time before that becomes another revenue stream for them?