Build, Distribute and Promote
Make great apps even better
Learn how Facebook helps you build immersive social apps and get more installs.
Build
Facebook SDK for iOS makes it easier and faster to integrate your iOS app with Facebook. From enabling Login with Facebook to ready-to-use native UI views, the SDK offers several powerful development tools. Read more
Build: Authentication and Permissions
Login with Facebook
Login with Facebook lets people sign into your app with their Facebook identity. If they already signed into Facebook iOS app, they don’t have to reenter their username and password.
Login with Facebook also helps people find your app on Facebook. Apps that implement Facebook Login show up in bookmarks and search results. Read our guide for details.
Easy to sign-in
Get a Bookmark
Appear in Search
iOS 6 integration
The Facebook SDK for iOS offers full, native integration with iOS 6. For Login and Feed posting, this means you have the ability to pop-up a native dialog box rather than fast-app-switching to the Facebook iOS App or Mobile Safari. This experience is less disruptive for people and significantly increases conversion. Just enable Login with Facebook and the SDK will ensure your apps work seamlessly on all iOS versions 4.0 and later.
Permissions
When people authenticate your app, by default, your app gets the ability to read only basic information. If you want to read additional data or publish data back to Facebook, you need to request additional permissions.
These fall into the following groups:
- Basic Information (no permissions)
- User and Friend Permissions
- Extended Permissions
- Open Graph Permissions
- Page Permissions
For more on how to request these permissions, please read our authentication documentation.
Build: Open Graph and Graph API
At Facebook’s core is the social graph: people and the connections they have to things they care about. Historically, Facebook has managed and expanded this graph over time with new products, like photos and places. In 2010, we extended the social graph with the Open Graph to include websites and pages people like throughout the web. The Open Graph also includes custom actions and objects from apps, and allows these apps to integrate deeply into the Facebook experience.
The Facebook Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (ex: people, photos, events and pages) and the connections between them (ex: friend relationships, shared content and photo tags).
Start integrating Open Graph into your app.
Build: Built-in Native UI Views
Built-in iOS Native UI
The SDK update includes a variety of native UI components for common functions. You can drop them into your apps instead of building each one from scratch. This gives you a fast, consistent way to build:
- User profile picture control: display a user’s profile picture.
- Place picker: enables people to query Facebook Places database to find nearby options and check-in.
- Friend picker: with single and multi-selection options, enables people to easily select friends. Supports filtering friends by device type and application authorization status.
- Login View: allows straightforward login flow for people logging into your app.
Distribute
A great benefit of integrating with Facebook is the potential reach you have when people share content from your app with their friends — over 500 million people actively use Facebook each month. Facebook provides several growth channels designed to help high-quality apps grow tremendously. Read more
Distribute: Social Channels
News feed
News feed appears as soon as people log into Facebook, making it core to the Facebook experience. You can publish content to the stream with Open Graph objects and native UI controls.
Timeline
Timeline represent a person's identity on Facebook. The timeline highlights the most important life moments and apps are a part of that. After people add your app to their timelines, app activity is shared on Facebook with Open Graph. In the same way standard activities appear on the timeline, an app activity shows up as reports and aggregations that are part of their personal history and identity on Facebook. This makes your app a key part of the Facebook experience.
Requests and Invites
Requests and Invites are direct communication channels between two people. Requests are always private and can only be seen by the recipient. Requests generate notifications on people's devices.
Sending
Receiving
Automatic Channels
To drive more traffic to your apps, we also enable some distribution automatically as people use your applications. Each of these automatic channels is designed to help engage people and surface the best content for each person. These include:
Bookmarks: Bookmarks let people easily get to your app from within Facebook. If your app has a Mobile Web URL set, a bookmark appears within the navigation of Facebook’s iOS app and m.facebook.com. We provide bookmarks to iOS apps that implement Login with Facebook.
Usage Stories: Once a person authenticates your app, depending on their privacy settings; many actions on Facebook can be shared with friends. Similarly, a variety of feed stories may be published to share the popular apps people's friends are using.
Search: When over 10 people use your app, it is automatically submitted to Facebook's search index. This allows people to quickly find your app and get back to it.
Distribute: App Center
The App Center makes it even easier for people to find your app from the Facebook iOS, Android or web app. From the mobile App Center, people can browse apps compatible with their device, and if a mobile app requires installation, they’ll be sent to download it from the App Store or Google Play. To submit your app for inclusion in the App Center, please follow these steps.
Distribute: Send to Mobile
We’ve built a convenient mobile install flow for people browsing the App Center on their computer. All apps built for iOS, Android, and the mobile web have a “Send to Mobile” button on their app detail page. Once people click “Send to Mobile,” they’re logged into your app and we immediately send a Facebook notification to their mobile device. By clicking the notification, they’ll be redirected to your mobile web app or the respective install page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Promote
After helping you build and ship your app, we also offer tools that help measure the impact of your design choices. You can further boost your app’s reach through our promotional products such as Pages, ads and sponsored stories. Read more
Promote: Know the people using your app
App Insights
Measure how people interact with your app to build the best possible experience. App Insights helps you monitor key metrics that define the usage and performance of your app. This includes a summary of analytics for your app: people using it, sharing and performance. You can also dive deeper to understand impact of specific features and performance of different distribution channels that we discussed in the previous sections. You can see these details in the Insights Dashboard or by clicking the Insights link on the App Dashboard.
Device filtering and installed users
With device filtering, you can determine which platform people using your mobile app are on – iOS or Android. Further, you can identify which iOS devices they use – iPhone or iPad. You can use this information for ad placement and to improve the overall app experience. This can also enable smarter growth and reengagement channel opportunities, such as prompting a person using a web app on an iPhone to install your native app or restricting requests only to people who have your app’s supported devices. You can now query the set of devices a person has via the Graph API.
If you have multiple apps, you can more effectively connect with your target audience by identifying which of your users’ friends use your apps. You can do this by getting the full list of someone's friends and then intersecting this against your database of people using other apps you have published.
Promote: Grow your Audience
Pages
With promotion, Pages is where everything starts – every important piece of content comes from your Page, and this is where you manage your interactions and provide customer services. Pages are how you connect with people to expand your reach beyond your current fan base.
Ads
You can now buy ads in the news feed showcasing your apps delivered to a variety of mobile devices. On mobile, the average rate of likes and comments per story impression in news feed is higher than on web. Receiving likes and comments is critical to get more exposure for a story in news feed.
Sponsored stories
Get your fans to tell your story and amplify your story through sponsored stories. When people open Facebook on their mobile devices, they see status updates and stories from their friends, songs and apps their friends like, and updates from their favorite brands. People learn about new things and new apps from these stories in mobile news feed – either because it is relevant to them or to their friends. Use sponsored stories to get more people engaged and excited about your app.
Learn more about ads and sponsored stories.
Updated about 2 weeks ago