Facebook wants to become an App Store in Europe

Following the passing of the EU's Digital Markets Act, Meta wants to turn Facebook into an alternative App Store for Android first, as soon as it can.

From early in 2024, Europe's Digital Markets Act will require Apple and Google to allow the use of alternatives to their App Stores. Meta now says it plans to become such an alternative, but will do it via an extension to its existing Facebook ads service.

According to The Verge, Meta will test this type of ad later this year, starting with a small group of Android app developers. The plan is for ads to allow Facebook users to download apps directly within the social media platform, rather than simply linking out to the Google Play Store.

"We've always been interested in helping developers distribute their apps, and new options would add more competition in this space," Meta spokesperson Tom Channick told the publication. "Developers deserve more ways to easily get their apps to the people that want them."

Reportedly, Meta aims to drive ad sales with this approach, and will not — at least at first — take a cut of developers in-app revenues.

Meta's proposal follows Microsoft's earlier announcement that it intends to offer its own App Store for both Android and iOS.

6 Comments

mattinoz 2473 comments · 9 Years

About 1 year ago

Well that will determine if customers value trust or just want a known brand.

dave2012 58 comments · 12 Years

As someone with a long experience of using the Mac platform, I believe you should be able to download what you want, from where you want, onto a device that you own yourself. So that's the principle, and I'm glad to see that's becoming law. In general, the EU seems to be at the forefront of good legislation about human rights and free trade, maybe because there is so much expertise to draw from across it's member states. Or maybe the legislation has to be good to get the approval of every member country.

However if Meta offer this for Macs they will need to curate this, because their reputation will plummet if users download malware. But they won't have the expertise, so they will have to limit it to apps that have already been approved on Apple's App Store. So it may turn out that developers will still need to have their Apps on the App store.

Japhey 1772 comments · 6 Years

I realized pretty quickly how terrible this company is, so I stopped using them about 16 years ago. I never deactivated my account, or whatever…I just simply abandoned it and forgot about it. I’ve moved twice since I last went anywhere near Fb. Now, after all this time, I’ve started to receive frequent emails from Facebook about groups and people in my new area.

How the hell are they still tracking an abandoned account that hasn’t been logged into for 16+ years? But, more importantly, why are they still tracking an account that has been abandoned for 16+ years?

Fuck this creepy company. They are literally the last place I would ever buy anything from.

FileMakerFeller 1561 comments · 6 Years

Japhey said:

I realized pretty quickly how terrible this company is, so I stopped using them about 16 years ago. I never deactivated my account, or whatever…I just simply abandoned it and forgot about it. I’ve moved twice since I last went anywhere near Fb. Now, after all this time, I’ve started to receive frequent emails from Facebook about groups and people in my new area.
How the hell are they still tracking an abandoned account that hasn’t been logged into for 16+ years? But, more importantly, why are they still tracking an account that has been abandoned for 16+ years?

Fuck this creepy company. They are literally the last place I would ever buy anything from.

Facebook analytics is a service used by many websites. The web server tracks the IP address used to access the resource (normal web behaviour). The Facebook analytics code obtains the IP address and a host of other data and submits it to the mothership; the backend uses a combination of this data as a key value in the database that holds Facebook account information. Once you open a Facebook account, data from the analytics service will get linked to that account in perpetuity - just because you haven't logged in to that account in more than a decade doesn't mean that the data in your account is no longer valid. Your tastes are unlikely to change much, therefore you can still be identified as being part of a cohort that a given advertiser might want to target.

Digital surveillance at internet scale is a scary thing.

accsmobi 10 comments · 1 Year

I hope Facebook goes extinct . Along with that android called zuckerberg . The biggest Mass surveillance network on the planet . Well ,maybe except google.

Gigantic database of billions of sheeps who keep shouting beeee ,in there ,posting about all the uninteresting things they do ,and all the ugly pics of their progenitors haha