India is the largest market for Facebook’s global program to help developers build apps – FbStart – outside the US, a senior company executive said. Launched in India in 2014, Facebook’s FbStart is a free one-year program to help early stage mobile developers build, grow and monetize their apps. “The reason for our existence is to make the world more open and connected and we have been trying achieving it though our family of apps over the past 12 years,” Satyajeet Singh, who leads Product Partnerships for Facebook in India, told IANS.
More than 75 per cent of top-grossing apps in India get integrated with the social media giant, Singh said. “Each month, 1.7 billion people use Facebook, one billion use WhatsApp, one billion use Messenger and over 500 million people use Instagram to connect and share their experiences but still billions of people are unconnected. That is why, we’ve built tools like Facebook Platform and initiated programs like FbStart, to help other developers in scaling their products and businesses and connect the world faster” he pointed out.
Singh noted that under FbStart, there is scope for high potential mobile start-ups who are developing high quality apps and have seen some growth in their target market and FbStart is taking them to the next level.
“It started off with a 100 developers and now they are over 9,000 start-ups in 147 countries,” he said. Noting that Indian market for FbStart is growing very rapidly, members in the platform regularly reach out to the company especially on the tools and services that they require. The company now wants to go even deeper and support their developer ecosystem and understand the main concerns of the developers, Singh said.
While acknowledging that technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), are the future, Singh said that FbStart has tools and platforms for building programs irrespective of which domain one is working on. We continue taking feedback on our community on how we can improve it, he added.