
Can Facebook help apps get iPhone distribution? - sanj
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/07/16/can-facebook-help-apps-get-iphone-distribution/
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sanj
Apple won't like anyone else pushing apps, but anyone can generate a link and
lead people to their content on the iTunes Store. As an example, our app is at
<http://itunes.com/apps/luckycal>.

But, it'd be trivial for Facebook to set up a config option during app setup
on their site asking for the URL of the iPhone application. I'm guessing
they'd want to make sure it was using FBConnect and so getting into that
directory might require a step of human intervention.

Second, I think that there's another path. Do you remember when the iPhone
first came out and the story line was that you were supposed to write web
apps? And that those would "just work" on the iPhone? It sounds silly now,
especially referencing the iPhone, but FB apps _are_ web apps.

In fact, for our iPhone application, we chose to build a very "thin" client
component and then sublaunch Mobile Safari so we could take advantage of
server-side work and rendering. I believe it works pretty well, but you're
welcome to see for yourself: <http://itunes.com/apps/luckycal>

Since FB Apps are just web apps, the apps 'tab' on the Facebook iPhone
application could launch the mobile version of the FB Apps the user has
installed -- ideally shrunk down and optimized for the handheld screen. In
fact, you could use a WebUI view to keep it within the Facebook iPhone
application and maintain the user experience. The sublaunch could deal with
handing over the credentials _and_ perhaps some other information (geolocation
comes to mind). I'd be happy to port what we've done into that environment.

The practical upshot would be that existing FBApps would have a place on the
iPhone with little additional work for Facebook.

