Although Facebook hasn’t developed a native Facebook application for Android phones yet, two third party Facebook apps have recently surfaced. New Facebook Android apps Bloo and Babbler are offering comprehensive Facebook features for users of the open-source phones by building native Facebook Android apps on top of the Facebook APIs.

These apps look really good and are pretty impressive given that they all run through Facebook’s general APIs – let’s check them out.

Bloo

Bloo, developed by Dimitris Couchell, supports status updates, wall-to-wall posts, YouTube video and photos. You can also comment on posts in your stream, and all of your activity in your feeds is highlighted in green.

Photos features are also robust. When you view your friends’ profiles and merge their contact information with a listing in your phone, you can then call or text that person directly from Bloo.When viewing photos in your feed, you view and add photo tags through Bloo from your phone. You can also upload photos to Facebook.

Finally, you can also view Facebook Events, get a recent Events history, and get one touch directions to Events. There’s also a dedicated button for synching events to your Google calender.

Babbler

Babbler, from Polish developers Kalicinsky.com, offers similar features to Bloo. With the Babbler Facebook app, you’re able to see your News Feed as well as your friends’ profiles, where you can comment and like wall posts and write on walls. You can also update your status and browse friends’ photos.

Babbler also lets you get notifications – such as when you’re tagged in uploaded photos or videos. You can also share links from the web browser or YouTube, as well as photos and videos from your galleries. Everything is run through a new interface with dedicated tabs for features that are most often used.

Conclusion

Both Bloo and Babbler use the Facebook API, which means there are some limits to what you can and cannot do from your phone. It does, however, mean that both apps are native to the Android OS (and not wrappers). Until Facebook decides to start building its own app for Android, we’re likely to see more and more third party apps like these filling the void. It will be interesting to see if and when Facebook decides to build one itself.