All You Need To Know About Development Of Mobile Applications For Facebook

Until not long ago, Facebook applications were not accessible from mobile devices through the mobile web version of Facebook or the different apps available for the different existing operating systems. 

Following Facebook’s recent Mobile Developer Conference , where the company introduced the mobile version of the Open Graph , an improved Facebook Login, and other enhancements for mobile developers, Facebook also announced the purchase of Parse , a cloud development platform that will help simplify the process of creating multi-device applications. All these news, along with the launch of Facebook Homeand improvements in company pages for mobile devices , seem to indicate that Facebook has proposed to make one of its weaknesses so far one of its greatest strengths: the mobile ecosystem.

When considering the development of mobile applications for Facebook, we must consider the different possibilities offered by the platform: develop native apps for iOS and / or Android or develop an application using web technology. What are the main differences ?

Native Facebook Mobile Apps vs. Web

The native mobile applications for Facebook integrate perfectly with our devices, but they involve an effort multiplied by three, since we must make at least three versions of the application if we want it to be accessible to all users: one for iOS , another for Android and another for computers .

Undoubtedly, the ideal would be to make a single application to save the time and costs involved in improving and correcting bugs in the different versions of our mobile application for Facebook. Thanks to HTML5 technology and responsive designs it is possible to unify all applications in a single development .

What Does It Take To Develop Mobile Applications For Facebook?

• Create an account on Facebook and become part of Facebook Developers.
• Hosting and domain or working from a local hosting and domain;).
• Knowledge of PHP , CSS , JavaScript / jQuery , HTML
• Know about configuration of HTTP / Apache servers and domains.
• Download the Facebook SDK for PHP and learn about the OAuth2 protocol .

How Do You Configure A Mobile Web Application For Facebook?

• We create a new application from Facebook Developers .

• We choose the App Namespace well , thinking about SEO and also about Facebook’s own search engine, that is, we try to pave the way to make a good marketing campaign for the application. It will probably take a while to find an available name, but you have to be patient 

• When editing the application settings , we will focus on three points that are the focus of this article:

• App on Facebook : We tell Facebook to load our web application in an application canvas when a user selects our application from Facebook. This mode is only accessible from the full version.

• Mobile Web : When the user enters our application from a mobile device, Facebook will automatically redirect him to the mobile version. So this URL must be ready on our server to respond.
• Website with Facebook Login : If we are going to require user information from Facebook, it is necessary to launch OAuth2 . Once the user authorizes the permissions , Facebook will redirect to the URL that we put in this field.