Facebook’s 300m app users

Sometime in the last couple of days, the monthly active users (MAU) of Facebook’s mobile apps passed 300m. 

Quite unsurprisingly, these are dominated by the two platforms that have traction, iOS and Android. As Techcrunch pointed out a few days ago, Android has now passed iOS in DAUs, though Apple has passed the round 100m MAU figure.  

Windows Phone remains quite insignificant, though that may change next year as Nokia’s efforts come fully on stream. Meanwhile around 70% of RIM’s 70m active users have installed the Facebook app. That’s a high penetration rate (it comes to around 50% for Android and iOS) on what is supposed to be a corporate product, pointing to RIM’s strength in messaging, but also to the way that the mix is shifting away from business customers and towards emerging markets and teenaged girls (in the UK at least). 

But the most important thing about this chart is the total - 300m mobile app users. This is more than either Apple or Android in total, each of which have around 225m active mobile users. Facebook doesn’t tell us how many only use Facebook on mobile, but the number is likely to be high.

How does this compare to mobile web users? Facebook gave a number for total users of 800m and mobile users of 350m back at the end of September, at which point there were around 250m MAUs of the apps (i.e. 350m people used Facebook on mobile of which 250m used the apps and 100m used the mobile web). In other words 70% of mobile users and 30% of all users used apps to access Facebook.  

Meanwhile the iOS and Android apps are on the way to being one platform, with Facebook moving them more and more towards being wrappers for a common HTML5 experience. Next year Facebook will treat that user base as less of a mobile extension to the desktop experience and more as the core product - starting with advertising. What will that do to mobile CPMs, I wonder? What happens when Facebook starts trying to take the full Facebook app ecosystem to mobile? People who want app stores to be replaced by HTML5 might get what they want, but not in the way that they mean…

(This is a preview of a report I’ll be publishing for Enders Analysis in the new year)

UPDATE  23 April 2012

This post is now quite old, but still gets lots of traffic. For the sake of housekeeping: 

  • Facebook has now stopped disclosing data for its own apps
  • The Windows Phone data appears not to reflect the real usage of the platform - Nokia has now sold ‘over 2m’ Lumia phones, but the Facebook app data is well below this. 


Facebook and the iPhone 4s: Facebook used to disclose, on a daily basis, monthly active users for each app on the platform, including the mobile phone apps. From today they’ve recently started rounding these to the nearest hundred thousand or so, which makes them less interesting, but I’ve been collecting the detailed numbers for the couple of months, and that means I can make this chart.  The line shows, very clearly, the slowdown in iPhone sales in the run-up to the release of what turned out to be the 4S, and more importantly it shows what’s happened since - even faster growth than before. No slowdown here. (I do this sort of stuff a lot for Enders Analysis. They sell it)
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Facebook and the iPhone 4s: Facebook used to disclose, on a daily basis, monthly active users for each app on the platform, including the mobile phone apps. From today they’ve recently started rounding these to the nearest hundred thousand or so, which makes them less interesting, but I’ve been collecting the detailed numbers for the couple of months, and that means I can make this chart. 

The line shows, very clearly, the slowdown in iPhone sales in the run-up to the release of what turned out to be the 4S, and more importantly it shows what’s happened since - even faster growth than before. No slowdown here.

(I do this sort of stuff a lot for Enders Analysis. They sell it)

GetJAR, Facebook and failed downloads?

GetJAR reports that it has delivered 113m downloads of Facebook mobile apps. This covers Android, Nokia and the J2ME feature phones but not (obviously) iOS, nor preloads of OEM Android apps, which are huge. 

But according to Facebook those three addressable categories ‘only’ add up to around 66m active users. And GetJAR is competing with the Android Market for installs, so there should be even more than 113m Facebook downloads to reconcile with those 66m actives. 

There are two three possible explanations:

  1. a massive failure rate for installs of downloads: 50% or more (i.e.people download the app but then can’t find it or make it work)
  2. a massive featurephone base not showing up in Facebook’s app-by-app stats. However, there isn’t really room in the numbers for this latter: as the charts in my previous post show, iOS, Android and RIM apps account for 210m of the solid 250m mobile users number that Facebook discloses
  3. GetJAR is including application updates in downloads

Facebook’s mobile users

A little idle browsing: Facebook has a page for every app authorised to connect to its system, and those pages give active users (examples: iPhone, Blackberry). So, you can see how many people are using each Facebook app on each mobile platform. You can then compare that to Facebook’s figure for its total user base (750m) and for the number of people using Facebook with mobile devices (250m).  

The interesting complication is that there are lots of independent apps, especially on the iPad (where there is no official one yet) and on Android, where the OEMs make their own (and there may be overlap with people using both the OEM app and the official app). HTC, Samsung, Moto, SE and LG Facebook apps combined add up to 24m actives versus 53m for the official Android Facebook app. 

Observations: 

  • Apple has sold around 190m iPhones and iPod Touches (of which not all are still active, of course) and has 85m Facebook app users - perhaps 50-60% penetration
  • Android is roughly at par with iOS with 76m FB installs despite having a smaller figure of 120-130m units in the market. A third of these are using the custom clients pre-installed by OEMs - clearly that’s a good deal for Facebook. However, this probably points to some duplication, with people using both the official and OEM apps. The minimum base, therefore, is the 53m using the official app
  • FAR fewer people use the mobile website exclusively than use apps (caveat - this assumes that the number of people using more than one app at the same is not significant)
  • Nokia’s ‘Ovi’ app is nowhere (5.6m), and indeed Facebook’s feature-phone app, launched in the last few months, is already ahead with 7.5m active users
  • Facebook has around half as many mobile users using third-party apps as using its own app

(update) All of the apps combined add up to 222m, not far off Facebook’s ‘250m mobile users’. The implication is that the remaining 28m are the only people exclusively using the mobile web for Facebook (the ‘mobile web only’ category below). In reality the scope for duplication in these numbers (how many people have Moto Blur updating their address book but also use the official app?) means the real mobile web number is probably bigger - plus that conveniently round 250m number dates from April. But if we take only the official apps (and hence remove any possible duplication), we still get to about 200m app users versus 50m mobile web users. 

Meanwhile the Facebook app for the RIM Playbook has 93k active users. So RIM must have sold at least that many of the 500k it claims to have ‘shipped’.