HTC today revealed the HTC First, the first Android smartphone that comes with Facebook Home pre-installed on the device.

With Facebook Home pre-installed on the HTC First, users can get all the experiences from the new Facebook Home app, such as cover feed and chat heads. But the HTC First packs some exclusive Facebook Home functionality that the app won’t have like the ability to feed in email and calendar notifications to the home screen.

“It’s a great opportunity to bring mobile and social together,” said HTC CEO Peter Chou at the event today held at Facebook’s headquarters.

Instead of building the mythical Facebook phone or its own mobile operating system, Facebook decided to partner with mobile device manufacturer HTC, and build an Android app that functions as a home screen replacement, without the need to fork or modify the Android OS. 

“Android was designed from the ground up to support these deep integrations,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Zuckerberg also revealed the Facebook Home Program for all original equipment manufacturers of Android devices, so in the future, more and more Android manufacturers could potentially design devices like the HTC First, with Facebook Home pre-loaded as the default home screen.

The HTC First will be available exclusively from AT&T on April 12 for $99.99, with four color choices including red, light blue, white and black. Pre-ordering for the HTC First begins today.

Finnish mobile game developer Rovio today announced it’s bringing the Facebook version of its flagship title, Angry Birds Friends, to mobile.

Angry Birds Friends is different from the other mobile versions in the franchise in how it monetizes and its social hooks. Whereas in the mobile versions a single lifetime purchase of $0.99 unlocks all of the game’s levels and powerups, players of Angry Birds Friends can only purchase a limited number of powerups that range from 20 uses for $1 to 1000 uses for $20. The Facebook version of the game also includes exclusive levels and items. Rovio has also expanded the game’s social features for Facebook, integrating Open Graph so users can add the app to Timeline, creating a more visible leaderboard that stays on the right side of the screen and allowing players to send and receive gifts. Players can also collect bonuses for playing every day and competing in weekly tournaments.

Rovio, presumably, hopes to drive up engagement by offering all of these social features and monetization methods to mobile players.

Angry Birds Friends peaked after it officially launched in May 2012 with 24.1 million monthly active users. It has been losing users steadily since, but seems to have platued in December 2012. Today AppData has Angry Birds Friends at an estimated 10.8 million MAU, placing it in the No. 38 spot of thr most popular Facebook games by MAU (right behind FreshPlanet’s SongPop and ahead of Zynga’s CityVille).

Aspects of Facebook’s new product for Android appear to be leaking ahead of the company’s scheduled announcement this Thursday. The consensus from multiple reports is that the social network will release a modified version of Android, a phone by HTC and “Facebook Home,” software that any Android device can run to give users a more socially integrated homescreen experience.

Facebook hasn’t offered any information about these possible products except a press invitation that included the phrase, “Come see our new home on Android.” TechCrunch reports that Facebook has altered the Android operating system to build in more social functionality, including features from News Feed and Messenger. The New York Times also has sources corroborating this. The OS might not be a full Android fork, such as what Amazon has done for its Kindle Fire, as TechCrunch says Facebook scaled back its ambitions when some key team members left the company.

This modified version of Android is likely to be running on a new device by Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC, which has worked with Facebook in the past to integrate the social network into its devices. 9to5Google’s sources, who are involved with a marketing campaign for the new phone, say it includes a 4.3-inch display and an iPhone-like “home button” at the bottom center of the device, with horizontal function keys to the left and right.

AndroidPolice got access to a “system dump” for the upcoming release, which includes code and files that hint at what will be announced. The HTC phone, code-named Myst, has a special Facebook app that includes all the necessary permissions to operate as a homescreen app, also known as a “launcher.” According to the files, Facebook’s will be called “Facebook Home” and will include shortcuts to create posts and a chat feature called “Chat Heads” which will run continuously in the background.

There are pieces of code that suggest Facebook Home will be available for download on other Android devices besides the HTC “Myst.” Unlike Apple’s iOS, Android allows users to run third-party launchers. This matches TechCrunch’s suggestion that Facebook would not limit its homescreen experience to a single device and manufacturer.

InsideFacebook will be covering the social network’s launch event live from Facebook HQ on Thursday.

This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Facebook.

In celebration of its 10 year anniversary, game company King.com tonight announced that it will be rebranding the company to just King as well as launching two new Saga games for Facebook (one of which will be coming to mobile soon).

As we noted yesterday, everyone at the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is talking about the success of King’s Candy Crush Saga game on mobile and social.

The first new Saga game coming to Facebook is physics-based Papa Pear Saga, which is based off King’s web-based Japanese Pachinko-like title Papa Pear. In the game, players are tasked with making each Papa Pear shot bounce on as many objects as possible before landing in each bucket. The title will be packed with 60 levels at launch as well as with three different game modes and several boosters to help users progress through the game. The game is now on Facebook, but will be “coming soon” to mobile for iOS and Android.

The second game King announced was Farm Heroes Saga, a match-3 game, with an item collecting aspect. Users are tasked with managing multiple components per level, like collection targets, special missions, boss fights, avoiding blockers and more. The game, which is currently in the soft-launch stage, features 70 levels, three game modes and multiple boosters that help users progress further into the game.

King also revealed some data for its games on mobile, social and online. The company says it now sees more than 108 million monthly players (49 million on mobile alone) and 12 billion gameplay sessions a month across its network of games on mobile, social and online.

“We have had lots of fun over the last 10 years making great games and we are honored to have acquired such a loyal fan-base,” said Riccardo Zacconi, co-founder and CEO of King, in a statement. “The exceptional growth of our mobile, Facebook, and cross-platform audience is a testament to the care and craft that goes into our games. We’re pleased to announce two new Saga games on Facebook with Papa Pear Saga and Farm Heroes Saga. These games build upon our Saga portfolio with new concepts that players are sure to enjoy.”

Candy Crush Saga is all the rage at the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, so much so that we weren’t even able to get into the “Candy Crush Saga postmortem: Luck in the Right Places” session today. The entire development community is interested in learning how Candy Crush Saga became an overnight success on mobile. Unfortunately, we were attending another session, and once we got out of that one, we found ourselves at the back of a line that was hundreds strong. However, at the “Free to Play Game Design: A Year in Review” session, the speakers analyzed trends they saw in the free-to-play space on mobile and social, including the trends they saw from King.com’s Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga.

The most notable trend noted by the speakers was the meteoric rise of King.com’s match-3 puzzler Candy Crush Saga, which skyrocketed up the app store charts since releasing for mobile in November 2012. According to past data from our traffic tracking service AppData, The game has been the No. 1 app on the top grossing Android apps chart for weeks as well as in and out of the top spot on the top grossing iOS apps charts for weeks. Candy Crush Saga also became the No. 1 game on the Facebook DAU chart, the first time since mid-2009 that a Zynga game didn’t hold the top spot.

Steve Meretzky, vice president of game design at Palydom, told the audience to stick with it and don’t give up when trying to reach success as a developer since it took a few “Saga” games before King.com struck gold with Bubble Witch Saga followed by Candy Crush Saga. Although both games feature proven gameplay mechanics seen in other games in the casual space, King.com incrementally innovated the formula enough to reach success, Meretzky says.

Another important factor to Bubble Witch Saga’s and Candy Crush Saga’s success was cross-platform gameplay. King.com kept the game near identical across all platforms, with a similar map screen, leaderboard, UI and more as well as letting the player carry their game progress across all platforms.

“It’s a great customer experience,” says Dave Rohrl, vice president of game production at Goko. “You can experience the game when, where and how you want. This lets players interact with your game a lot more, which ultimately increases their engagement and monetization.”

Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga aren’t the only games pulling off cross-platform gameplay between Facebook and mobile. Casino games like GSN Casino, DoubleDown Casino and Zynga Poker pull off cross-platform gameplay as well as games like Words With Friends.

And there are plenty of games where games on both Facebook and mobile don’t feature cross-platform gameplay like CityVille Hometown and Kingdoms of Camelot (Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North on mobile). Both make the user restart from zero on mobile and Facebook. Rohrl adds that not delivering on cross-platform gameplay is awful, but hopes the feature will become an industry standard in the future.

“This nut will be cracked in the near future, and this will be an absolute baseline for games in the future,” he says.

Facebook will no longer display mobile bookmarks for apps unless they are games that function on both mobile devices and the desktop canvas, according to a post on the company’s developer blog. The change goes into effect June 5.

Bookmarks were likely not driving much traffic to most mobile apps so it wasn’t necessary to keep them around. However, Facebook wants to promote cross-platform game development so it will give them the benefit of mobile bookmarks. With fewer apps being included in the bookmarks menu, the few cross-platform games that do appear there could see more traffic than they were before.
(more…)

Game developer Electronic Arts PopCap today released Solitaire Blitz for iOS, a fast-paced, competitive card game.

Solitaire Blitz, which released for Facebook last year (Read our review of the game here), currently has 483,055 daily active users on the social platform, according to estimates from our traffic tracking service AppData.

In Solitaire Blitz, users are tasked with matching cards to clear their decks of cards in 60 seconds. Users can also compete with friends and follow along with the game’s storyline.

“The touch-screen experience takes Solitaire Blitz to whole new level,” said Scott Willoughby, franchise director for Solitaire Blitz, in a statement. “Combined with everything else that makes this game so amazing, you end up with the best free solitaire game available for mobile devices.” “Existing fans and first-time users alike are going to love this new version, especially since they can now compete with friends for high scores on the go.”

The game is available now for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

MessageMe today announced that it now sees more than 1 million active users in its messaging app MessageMe since launching on March 7 for iOS and Android.

MessageMe also announced that the company received $1.9 million in seed round funding, with participation from True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Social+Capital Partnership. Angel investors of MessageMe include Brian Pokorny, Hiten Shah, Eric Wu, Rex Ng and Suleman Ali.

MessageMe is a mobile messenger, allowing users to send more than just a text to friends and family by tapping a “+” button, which slides up another screen with buttons that users can choose from to send a picture, doodle, video, voice message, location update, or piece of music. For example, users can send a picture from Google Images, music from iTunes or a video from YouTube, without having to leave the app.

MessageMe joins a highly competitive, and lucrative, app genre filled with the likes of Chinese Internet giant Tencent’s WeChat, NHN Japan’s Line, South Korean KakaoTalk and U.S. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Snapchat.

“Our space is very competitive,” says Arjun Sethi, co-founder and CEO of MessageMe. “There are lots of great companies out there already building apps. The one core principal and philosophy we have around what were building is that we think about the way users communicate and the way that we want them to communicate longer term as well. That fundamental idea is very different from the other companies.”

Sethi tells Inside Mobile Apps that his company is not focused on immediately monetizing users through advertisements and other means. Although MessageMe does have two place-holder buttons labeled “Sticker” and “Money”. Sethi adds that those two buttons are two forms of monetization strategies for the app, which are currently in the testing phase. Monetizing through a special emoji, aka stickers, isn’t anything new. Apps like NHN’s Line have been monetizing via users purchasing stickers through in-app purchasing for months.

MessageMe is also currently seeing users sending more than 500 notifications per second worldwide as well as more than 10 million doodles and four million songs on iTunes shared in the U.S.

Last Friday, MessageMe, which launched with the ability for users to find friends via their phone contacts or Facebook, reportedly lost the Find Friends feature for Facebook. Although the app was updated on Monday, users still can’t find their friends via Facebook, only phone contacts work right now. Communication app Voxer as well as Twitter’s Vine app had the Find Friends feature get cut off by Facebook.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, MessageMe is the No. 100 ranked app in the overall top free apps category and the No. 13 ranked app in the social networking category. For Android, MessageMe landed at the No. 59 spot in the communication category.

Facebook today announced a new technical conference series for mobile developers to learn about incorporating Facebook into their apps and to connect with engineers and product managers from the platform team.

Mobile DevCon 2013 will take place in New York on April 18, London on May 2, and Seoul on May 7. The conference is free, but developers must apply to attend and space is limited. Facebook says this is a “highly technical event” that will dive “deep in product and code.”

Topics for the conference include how to implement Facebook’s mobile SDKs to drive installs and engagement, using Facebook Login, Open Graph best practices, creating social mobile games, design and product tips, as well as a look at the tools, libraries and techniques Facebook uses to build its own mobile applications. The company says insights from Fab.com, GetGlue, Zeebox, EyeEm and other mobile developers will be part of the agenda. At the end of the day, developers will have opportunities to speak one-on-one with Facebook employees about their apps.
(more…)

Programming-related fields practically invented the terms “crunch time” and “non-traditional work hours”, but a new infographic from Wix argues that the new app economy is a kinder, gentler tech field with room for growth.

It says the average app developer gets $90,000 annual and puts in between 37 and 40 hours a week. App developers have created 466,000 jobs since apps became mainstream five years ago.

We’re assuming that the data here leans towards developers within an established or corporate company. It may be another sign that the era of the lone programmer sitting in her proverbial garage is closing.

Wix also provides argument for the five primary app markets: Android, Chrome, Facebook, iOS and, of course, Wix. For Android, it argues that Google is on track to have one-million active apps faster than Apple, and Google’s Chrome has more than a third of the web browser market. Facebook has its billion users, still making it worth exploring despite the many hiccups of one-time leaders like Zynga.

The interesting nuggets here are in the analysis of both iOS and of Wix itself. Starting right now, the iPad app market is expected to grow 35 percent annually, adding serious room for growth. As far as the productivity-focused Wix App Market, it argues that it has the best of both worlds: an audience of 30 million SMBs with less competition than other platforms.

The full infographic is after the jump.

(more…)