New Data on Facebook Apps for International Markets

July 2nd, 2008

By Justin Smith

Many developers have been asking whether they should develop for international markets now or wait for Facebook to release its crowd-sourced translation tools for applications. New data is available tonight on applications developed in other languages.

In total, there are 527 apps currently listing a language other than English as their primary language. That’s about 1.7% of the 30,000 Facebook apps currently in the directory.
The most popular apps in languages other than English are Sexo Quizz (French), with 25,000 daily active users, Horoscope (French), with 18,000 daily active users, and Tarot Gratis (Spanish), with 13,000 daily active users.
Spanish is by far the language with the most apps developed at 330. Next comes French at 134. Trailing far behind are German (11), Italian (9), Japanese (7), Danish (6), and Finnish (6). Less than 5 apps have been developed in Chinese, Catalan, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, and Korean.

Developers keeping track of Facebook’s user counts in international markets will note that there remain tremendous opportunities for local developers in languages with huge user populations on Facebook.

And as a final note, in addition to adding a language filter to the application directory, Facebook also removed application counts from the directory. Now, you’ll need a third party service to count.

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Filed in Development, Facebook, International

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5 Responses to “New Data on Facebook Apps for International Markets”

Desi Vanrintel Says:
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:45 am
It would be nice though if developers could just point out which language they support in their facebook applications. we are currently supporting english (because that’s obviously the biggest group), french and dutch, and will support more.
Social Marketing Journal Says:
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:33 am
Interesting! We noticed Afrikaans has a few apps as well for South Africa. It would be great to see this language filter in place.
Arto Liukkonen Says:
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:05 am
This chart doesn’t completely speak the truth, since there is really only three Finnish applications. Two of those apps are only advertising campaigns, and one doesn’t exist.

I’ve build one of those three real Finnish applications, and I can promise more Finnish apps to be launched before autumn.

However, numbers in this chart are quite interesting, since I’ve planned doing localization for my apps. Everything for community-based translations is ready, almost only thing needed anymore is to click it on. Too bad FB don’t offer it’s translation tools for apps and forces us to build our own systems…
John Fan Says:
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:36 pm
I thought there were several large Turkish apps? Also, 6waves (Hong Kong) has some Chinese apps that have a large number of users too.
chris@6waves Says:
July 5th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
I agree that the charts are definitely incorrect. Just by ourselves, we own 30+ Chinese apps. And the problem with the language selection is that sometimes apps are built for more than one language. One obvious thing is that Taiwan and Hong Kong basically use the same written language. So apps shouldn’t be divided into TW or HK.