Facebook announced a major push to its Android SDK today by releasing Facebook SDK 3.0 beta for Android. Accompanying this release was the new Android Dev Center which enables developers to get better access to tools and documentation regarding development on Android. The Facebook developers blog mentioned new features like new Native UI controls which included Friend Picker, Places Picker, Profile Picture Control and Login Control. It also mentioned simplified session management, better Facebook API support and mobile install measurement among other highlights.
Simplified session management includes tools to ease the authentication and authorization process, the blog added that “the modular design handles details you don’t care about while giving you more control when you need it.” This will easily help determine whether the user is logged in or not. Better Facebook API support now allows developers to batch Facebook API calls, makes MVC style programming easier and also includes much better JSON manipulation. The new mobile install ads product in conjugation with the Facebook SDK enables measurement of clicks and installs from mobile app install ads. This feature is certainly one of the ways that will allow Facebook to churn money from its mobile platform, something it has been pressurized to do for a long time.
The new Android Developer Center includes a new Getting Started Guide, Concepts, How-to’s, Tutorials and other detailed reference material which definitely doesn’t look like a rehash of the old one and should be a great source of new information to developers.
This shows the kind of effort the social networking giant is putting in to make sure it has the maximum exposure on the mobile platform, and Android having the largest amount of users overall, is definitely quite important to the company which is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that it is able to make the best use of this mobile developer ecosystem to earn good revenue from this platform.
