Beyond smartphones: 'Facebook for every phone' has 100 mn users

Facebook’s mobile users just keep on increasing and the growth isn’t just coming from smartphones and tablets. Feature phones are adding to the social networking website as well and the company today confirmed that its ‘Facebook for every phone’ has nearly 100 million users.

Ran Makavy, Growth Manager for Facebook, wrote in a company blog post ,

We are excited to announce that there are now more than 100 million people using Facebook For Every Phone each month.

This is an important milestone for us. Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected, and Facebook For Every Phone enables people around the globe to connect to the people and things they care about most, no matter what kind of mobile device they use.

Today, millions of people in developing markets like India, Indonesia and the Philippines are relying on this technology to connect with Facebook, without having to purchase a smartphone.

Facebook for Every Phone is a native app that works on feature phones as well such and the social networking site claims it can run on more than 3000 devices. The feature app has all the traditional elements of Facebook such as News Feed, Messenger and Photos.

Facebook For Every Phone is powered by technology created by Snaptu, which uses power of servers to accelerate and optimise the way mobile apps works on low-end devices. The app was launched in 2011 and that fact that it has 100 million users in just two years, shows that mobile will remain the key for Facebook’s success.

The app makes sense in markets such as India where smartphone penetration is still low (under 10 percent) and feature phones still dominate. According to this NYT blog ,the countries in which the simple phone software is doing the best include India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and Vietnam.

Facebook is a mobile company, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company’s Q4 earnings call for 2012 . This a key statement if one were to look at how the site has evolved from when it started. As far as the US is concerned, Facebook’s mobile appaccounts for 23 percent time spent on mobile apps in the US, followed by Instagram which is at 3 percent and Gmail also at 3 percent. But of course this is a market where smartphones dominate.

On the other hand, in developing countries feature phones are the key as not everyone can afford a high-end smartphone. For Facebook the next big move will be to move from its current one billion users to the next one billion users and a lot of them are going to come from developing countries such as India, Mexico, Vietnam, Brazil, Philippines, etc.

In such a scenario the growing success of ‘Facebook for every phone’ shouldn’t be seen as a surprise.