The future of Facebook lies on the mobile phone and the tablet rather than the desktop PC, the social network has claimed.
Facebook is forecast to take one third of the total money spent on mobile
advertising in the coming year, and already derives a third of its revenue from
mobile. Although shares rose immediately after the announcement, investors
remain cautious about the site’s ability to effectively make money from users on
mobile phones, especially as more of them are using cheaper devices with smaller
screens.
The new app, called Facebook Home, will launch on April 12 in America and around
the world in the following weeks, and is only available for Android phones. Many
of the features it introduces are unlikely to be popular on the Apple iPhone or
iPad because of the way Apple controls the software. Mr Zuckerberg repeatedly
stressed that what he was doing was only possible because of the way Google
built the operating system. But with the support of Sony and Huawei as well as
Samsung and HTC, the new service represents a challenge to Google’s dominance of
its own Android operating system and implicitly downgrades the importance of
search and email.
