Facebook for Android has overtaken iPhone’s version for the first time, according to the AppData tracking service.
The Facebook Android app now has 58.8m daily active users, against the iPhone’s version, which has 57.6m. This is despite the fact that the iPhone version of the Facebook app was launched in July 2008, while the Android version came only in September of 2009.
According to the researchers, Apple still had the largest monthly installed base, however, with the iPhone app having 99.5m monthly active users versus Android’s 86.1m. The daily figures suggest that may be about to change.
According to Gartner, the third quarter of 2011 saw Android phones accounting for 52.5% of handsets worldwide against just 15% for iPhones. Of course all of those iPhones would be regarded as high-end smartphones, while there is far greater variation in the Android space, from smartphones down to ‘feature phones’ with more limited functionality.
Facebook may see Android as a more important development platform than the iPhone – for example it got its new Timeline feature ready for Android handsets before the iPhone version.
