Facebook‘s Android app has beat the iPhone in daily active users today, but report shows when it comes to count the monthly activity Facebook’s Android application is still trailing behind iPhone’s app. AppData analysts revealed that the Android application had achieved around 58.3 million daily active users on December 17, while the iPhone’s numaer of users were 57.4 million DAU. Undeniably, Facebook is the most popular Android app for users whose age is around 18 and older, as said by a Nielsen report. The social network’s app was released right after the Android Marketplace as most used application for Android users between the ages of 18 and 44, which indicates Android users of a wide age range are more focused to what Facebook is doing in their mobile strategy. Now report clearly shows they’re paying more attention daily.
Android usually commands the most market share at around 40 percent rise, but as far as the activity on Facebook’s mobile app in concerned, iPhone has rung king. The new swing in daily active users is perhaps a natural preference of the operation system with the biggest share of voice, but it may also be a lot easier: Facebook just updated its Android app. Before Android users could be able to enjoy the new experience, Facebook updated its iOS applications which offer a new sidebar and simpler navigation around the app. It was loading faster, sleeker and Android users were still trapped with the older version, which is much slower. Only 11 days ago, however, Facebook updated the Android app, offering faster features along with new navigation that iOS users were already enjoying. If people enjoy faster user experience in addition to simple interface, they are more likely to use the application.
Another reason behind its raising popularity is Facebook released the much expected Timeline feature on Thursday, and with it they brought another update to the Android app to support the feature. Incidentally the iPhone app’s Timeline compatibility has not been updated until Sunday. Therefore Android users got extra advantage as they can access to an interesting new feature on a device that iPhone users didn’t received yet.
At the current scenario when the app is updated, we are keen to see whether the Android daily active users truly keep on surpassing the iPhone. For the moment the iPhone still grabs monthly active users and we can not deny the possibility to restore its daily activity very soon.
