Facebook App Center Brings Paid-for Ingredient to Social App Mix

App Center covers all apps compliant with platform guidelines, plans for flat fee paid-for apps revealed.

A blog post on the Facebook developers` blog announced the launch of the App Center to serve as “the new, central place to find great apps”. Each listed app will have its own detail page, a no-strings-attached preview of the app`s functionalities for potential users.

The main criterion for listing in the App Center is “the quality of an app”, defined as a combination of users ratings and engagement. The introduction of an “app ratings metric”, with findings broken down by gender and age groups, is designed to help developers keep an eye on the evolution of their app over time. Consequently, user ratings now play a major role in app selection on Facebook.

The App Center also aims for a mobile install boost with Facebook users being able to browse through a variety of mobile apps and then download them directly from App Store or Google Play. This adds to the already existing Login mobile use support mechanism, which “ensures all referral traffic from Facebook to [the] application is already connected with Facebook”.

Facebook is free and will remain free, but Facebook apps might not, as the beta version of a flat fee payment system for apps has also been launched.