14 DAY TRIAL // There have been plenty of rumors about Facebook's HTML5 mobile app platform, sometimes called Project Spartan. Plenty of developers have been working on it and there was a sense that it could be Facebook's biggest move yet, bypassing the gatekeepers, Google and Apple, by launching its own app store purely on the web. So it can become a gatekeeper itself.
Now, Facebook has finally unveiled its mobile app platform and, while it's certainly a big step forward and developers will very much love the new capabilities, it's not exactly going to usurp anyone.
In fact, Facebook seems content to play ball and actually help Apple's Appstore by sending it users that have found an app via their friends.
The answer is rather simple and is evident from the little that Facebook has said and, more so, from what it's doing.
It's enabling native iOS apps to integrate into Facebook as well, not only HTML5 web apps. This enables Facebook to seed its features into a lot more apps, but it also means it's giving up some control.
The most telling point though is that it is not allowing app developers to use Credits, its virtual currency, in apps that run on the native iOS Facebook apps.
Apple's new policies forbid any in-app payments or external subscriptions for apps unless it gets a 30 percent cut, so this makes sense.
But Facebook is also banning Credits from the mobile web apps that run on Apple devices. Apple should have no say on what Facebook does on its website.
Facebook is keeping the Credits requirement intact for anything that isn't an Apple device, meaning the Android platform. The Android app doesn't support third-party mobile apps yet.
The rumors say that Facebook has had the mobile platform and the Facebook app ready for quite a while, yet it didn't move forward.
What likely happened is that Facebook and Apple were engaged in bitter negotiations over what Facebook could and could no do on the Apple platform.
Apple couldn't have any say on what the Facebook mobile website would be able to do, but it could reject any Facebook native app.
While Facebook is a big proponent of the web, mostly because it can have more control over it, it knows that a mobile website, with all the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in the world, couldn't compare to a native app.
So, in the end, it caved and relinquished any plans for a mobile app store of its own, if it had any, as well as any hope of making money from mobile apps running of Facebook in exchange for, well, not much really.
It got to launch its iPad app, but Apple shouldn't have rejected it anyway as long as Facebook didn't build any monetization options into it.