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Comment by joshaidan | Hacker News Reader

"...One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us."

I find this part of the quote interesting. Those people who use mobile web, what platform are they using? Are they using iOS or Android based devices, and using the web? Or are they using other lower end phones?

Could this number actually decrease if Facebook linked to the apps in their emails, rather than the mobile site? (I guess this might be hard to pull off, but would be better in the long run)

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My girlfriend uses the mobile web version of Facebook on a semi-dumb slider phone (it might be some variant of Symbian). I find it baffling because the browser is so terrible and the screen is 320x240, but she's perfectly happy with it. She never uses it for any other sites. I wonder if Facebook has an unusually high number of users like that. The demographic would be invisible to the rest of the web community because those users never leave Facebook.

I can't speak for others but I have an iPhone and choose to only access Facebook through the mobile site. Two reasons:

1. I prefer not to allow Facebook to run a native app on my phone. Various reasons boiling down to not trusting it to act in my best interest.

2. Poor performance of the iPhone app -- I hear the new version is supposed to be better but that still doesn't solve problem 1.

Facebook created a very specific version of their site for dumbphones a while ago, I think an article I saw about it said it was targeted at places like Africa etc where mobile phone use is becoming common, but computer usage isn't. Which makes perfect sense really, there's a much larger percentage of the worlds population that use phones over computers in less developed parts of the world. They're a growth segment, no point blocking them when you can hook them now.

Edit: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_mobile_facebook_wi... there we go, Facebook Zero.

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