Facebook has 300 million app users (report)

FROM: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-has-300-million-app-users-report/6721

Summary: Facebook has over 300 million monthly active mobile app users, according to a new report. Can you guess which platform has the highest penetration rate when it comes to using the Facebook app?

Facebook’s apps now have 300 million monthly active users (MAU). This number is unsurprisingly dominated by the two biggest mobile platforms: Android and iOS. It’s worth noting that this is more than the total number of mobile users that Apple or Google have each, which is somewhere around 225 million active mobile users, according to Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans.

Facebook does not release milestones for its mobile apps or mobile website. The social networking giant only offers two types of metrics: total number of active users (800 million) and total number of mobile active users (350 million). Both numbers are as of September 22, 2011, so we unfortunately can’t compare them to this latest milestone to see how many users are using the mobile website (not to mention that there is definitely some overlap, with many users accessing both the app and site). Still, Evans says 70 percent of mobile users use a Facebook app to access the service, and some 30 percent of all users use a Facebook app.

Earlier this month, Facebook for Android passed Facebook for iPhone in daily active users (DAU), but it still has fewer MAU. Unlike other platforms, Facebook develops the apps for iOS and Android. For iOS, Facebook has long-supported the iPhone and iPod touch, and only started supporting the iPad two months ago. For Android, Facebook is currently only supporting smartphones and has said nothing about tablets.

The penetration rate for Android and iOS is somewhere around 50 percent. For BlackBerry, it’s much higher, but this isn’t too surprising given that the Facebook app comes preinstalled with the device. The same goes for Windows Phone, although its market share is still pretty much insignificant. Although Symbian is present on the graph above, Evans doesn’t consider it worth