As users increasingly check Facebook from phones and tablets, the social network is placing more ads in the mobile feed. Although the company says it is monitoring ad performance and user sentiment, two important feedback mechanisms are either missing or hidden on most mobile versions of Facebook: “hide” and “mark as spam.”

These options, which are available on every sponsored or organic story within the desktop feed, are inconsistent when it comes to mobile. Mobile ads are already a $3-million-a-day business for Facebook, but for the company to truly get a sense of how users feel about ads and other content in their feed, there needs to be a clear way for them to provide negative feedback. As it stands now, the social network is likely missing important data and in some cases may be getting false-positive signals when users try to mark a story as spam but end up clicking into it instead.

For instance, on m.facebook.com, users have to tap on the Likes/Comments section of a post, which will take them to a new screen where they can tap a button in the top right corner and then select “hide story” or “report/mark as spam.” If no one has Liked or commented on a story, there is no way to provide this negative feedback. If the story is a photo, users have to tap a small “report photo” link below the image because no button appears in the top right.

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Some Facebook users now have the option to sync their iPhone photos to a private album on the social network. This feature was previously available for the Android app but is newly being tested on iOS.

Photo syncing helps users save their mobile photos to the cloud and makes them easy to share on Facebook. Google has had a similar option called “Instant Upload” for Android and Google+ since it launched its own social network in 2011. Facebook replicated the feature on Android earlier this year. However, perhaps because of development challenges on iOS or because iOS users may be less familiar with the option, Facebook did not begin offering it on Apple’s operating system until now.

Photo syncing could encourage users to share more images on the social network, while also serving as backup storage for users who aren’t already saving photos to another cloud service. Facebook will store up to 2GB of photos. Google+, on the other hand, has unlimited storage. However, so far Facebook hasn’t positioned the feature as an alternative to Dropbox or Apple’s Photo Stream. Instead, it highlights that users can “get the photos in your camera roll to Facebook automatically.” This might not be appealing to users who are more distrustful of Facebook. The company tries to make it clear — using boldface and an underline — that photos stay private until users decide to share them.

Users who are in the initial test group can turn on photo syncing by visiting the photos section of the Facebook for iOS app — this is possible from a user’s own Timeline or from the bookmarks menu. Users can tap “sync” from the bottom of their screen if it is available. So as not to consume a user’s data plan, Facebook will sync photos at a smaller file size if users are on a cellular network. When users are on Wi-Fi, which does not cut into a user’s data plan, Facebook will sync larger versions of photos. Users have the choice to sync over Wi-Fi only if they wish.

More details are available from Facebook’s Help Center.

Top image from TechCrunch. Bottom image from Facebook.

Facebook today announced updates to its iOS and Android applications that include the long-awaited share button and in-line tagging for all posts, status updates and comments.

We found Facebook testing the feature on the mobile touch site earlier this week, but Facebook did not say how soon it would bring it to the native apps. Now it seems the update is rolling out for both apps today, though the design is slightly different on the different platforms. Android uses a more prominent button design like we saw on the mobile web, while iOS simply adds “share” as a word next to Like and comment.

In-line tagging is something that has been available on the mobile site since this summer but hadn’t been brought to the native apps until now. When users begin to type a friend’s name in a post or comment, a menu will appear with options of people to tag. This allows users to mention their friends within a sentence as opposed to having their names appear at the end of a post.

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Facebook today released an update for iOS that introduces support for Facebook Gifts and brings key features of its standalone Camera and Messenger apps to the main app.

Users in the U.S. who already have access to Facebook Gifts will now be able to browse and send gifts to friends either by visiting a friend’s profile or the Events section of the app. However, there doesn’t appear to be a way to search or filter results, so users have to scroll through dozens or hundreds of gift ideas to find what they’re looking for.

More useful features include multi-photo upload and photo editing. Facebook for iOS previously had a way to create an album and upload more than one photo at a time, but few users knew about it and it was a slow process. Now, the main app includes the same quick upload flow as the standalone Camera app, including options for cropping and adding photo filters.

Similarly, Facebook has taken features from Messenger and brought them to the main app. Users can now swipe left to access a list of frequently contacted friends and others who are currently online. This change means the option to sort News Feed by “top stories” or “most recent” is no longer accessible from the top right corner. Instead, users can tap the gear icon next to the News Feed bookmark in the left-hand menu to do so.

Today’s update is the first iOS update since Facebook overhauled the app for speed in August.

Facebook today announced that its mobile app install ads have come out of beta and are available for all iOS and Android developers that have integrated Facebook into their apps.

These ads, which went into beta in early August, allow developers to promote their native mobile apps through Facebook News Feed. When a user clicks on the ad, they are taken to a download page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.

Developers can use the same demographic and interest-based targeting options as they can for other ads on the Facebook platform, including being able to target users who have not already connected with an app. Other mobile ad networks do not have a way to determine if a user has already downloaded an app, but Facebook can see if a user has logged into an app with Facebook and then avoid wasting impressions on those users.

Facebook says beta partners like Kabam, Fab, TinyCo and Big Fish were able to efficiently drive installs among relevant audiences. For example, TinyCo saw 50 percent higher clickthrough rates and significantly higher conversion rates compared to other mobile advertising channels. Fab found Facebook’s mobile install ads to be five times more effective than other mobile ad networks.

Some Preferred Marketing Developers were also part of the beta, buying mobile app install ads on behalf of developers. For example, Nanigans saw 8-10x reach compared to other mobile ad buys it has done for clients. It says average CPCs range from $0.18 to $0.60, and in some instances, CTRs have been higher than 3 percent. Ad Parlor saw CTR consistently between 1-2 percent.

As we wrote about Tuesday, Facebook recently began testing a new design for these ads, which are larger and include the “Install Now” call to action, as well as star ratings.

About 20.1 percent of Facebook users connect to the service on an Android device compared to 18.9 percent of users who connect with an iOS device, according to data from Optimal, Inc.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer last week that Facebook had more users on Android than iOS. We asked social media advertising and analytics platform provider Optimal for the details.

Optimal’s data shows about 189.8 million users active on Android devices — accessing Facebook through the native app or the mobile web. About 178.3 million are active on iOS. That’s among 944.2 million monthly active users addressable with the Facebook Ads API, not the full billion announced last week.

Below are the top 20 territories with the highest share of Android usage. The “Index” figure in the chart shows relative prevalence of each OS versus the population, so it compares global Android penetration to Android penetration in that country — and does the same for iOS.

Android has the highest share in South Korea, where it is used by 52.6 percent of the population versus 20.3 percent using iOS. Singapore and Australia have the highest iOS penetration, both with 48.8 percent of the population using Apple’s mobile OS.

The U.S. has the highest collective penetration of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, with 83.5 percent of the Facebook population using these devices each month. The country is among the 38 percent of territories with more iOS than Android usage. In the U.S., 44.1 percent of users are on iOS versus 39.4 on Android.

The countries with the next largest population of Facebook users, Brazil and India, both use Android more than iOS, but these devices make up a smaller percentage of overall use as feature phones still dominate these markets. In Brazil, for example, Android has 11.8 percent share and iOS has 6.4 percent share.

U.K. Facebook users are split 28.2 percent on iOS and 16.2 percent on Android.

Facebook does not share an exact breakdown of how many users access the social network via native apps compared to the mobile web, but Zuckerberg says overall more people use the mobile web than native iOS and Android apps combined. The company has recently been working to improve its native offerings. The iOS app was updated at the end of August, focusing on speed by replacing some HTML5 with native functionality. Engadget reports today that a new native Facebook for Android app is in the final stages of testing, according to an anonymous source. Zuckerberg previously said that this was in the works, but did not offer a time frame for when it would be available.

Early tests from Optimal and other advertising companies showed that clickthrough and conversion rates were higher on Android than iPhone, though costs per click and per fan were higher. Optimal says Android users took additional actions, such as viewing profile photos, Liking posts and commenting, more often than iPhone users did.

More than 15.3 million users have connected their Facebook accounts with iOS 6, according to our AppData tracking service.

On Monday, Apple announced that more than 100 million iOS devices are running the latest operating system. This means roughly 15 percent of iOS users have connected with Facebook only a week after the option became available. Facebook integration in iOS 6 allows users to post photos and status updates directly to the social network, sync their contacts and events, as well as Like items in iTunes and the App Store.

It’s worth noting that users can connect a single Facebook account to multiple devices — an iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, for example — and the number of devices running iOS 6 and connecting with Facebook is growing every day so this is a very early figure. Overall, though, this is a good number of people connecting with Facebook, considering that users are not prompted to connect their accounts during the process of upgrading to iOS 6 or starting up their iPhone 5. It seems many users were aware of the Facebook integration in advance and sought out to connect their accounts through the settings menu, where they can also configure Twitter sharing. Users will also see a prompt when they attempt to share a link or photo to Facebook for the first time.

Some users might have hesitated to connect with Facebook because of reports that it will create duplicate contacts or include the wrong email addresses for their friends. However, users have the option to disable contacts and events from syncing. Others might not ever want to connect their accounts because they prefer not to link Facebook to other services. When users connect iOS with Facebook, third-party apps can more easily use a person’s Facebook information to customize the experience, though users have full control over which apps can do this.

According to AppData, iOS has 15,346,811 monthly active users and 12,492,123 daily active users. For the most part, Facebook has not been reporting numbers for iOS, but it did temporarily today.

Facebook today released Facebook SDK 3.1 for iOS, which includes support for iOS 6 integration and more native UI controls that developers can plug into their apps.

The update builds upon much of what was announced in July with the 3.0 beta version, but now that iOS 6 is available for all users, development will ramp up. With the new iOS integration, developers can use the native Facebook Login so users don’t have to switch between apps during the auth process. There is also an option for apps to post to Facebook using the new native share dialog. Both features are seen below.

Today’s SDK update also includes ready-to-use UI controls — profile picture control, Friend Picker and Place Picker – which Facebook introduced this summer. There also seem to be additional login controls for easily building login and logout experiences. These components allow developers to begin from a template rather than building each from scratch. For example, the friend-picker tool gives users a familiar UI to invite their friends to use an app. It will even allow developers to filter friends by device and app auth status, so that users don’t send invites to friends who don’t use iOS devices or who have already added the app.

Version 3.1 brings improved API support and session management, as well as a new ad analytics beta product for developers to understand the effectiveness of the mobile Facebook ads they run for their apps. More information is available from the Facebook Developer site here.

Apple today announced a Sept. 19 release date for iOS 6 and a new version of the iTunes App Store, which both include Facebook integration.

As previewed in June, iOS 6 will include Facebook “tap to post” and sharing from Photos, Safari, Maps and other applications. Users can also post status updates using Siri. Apple has added Facebook contact info to its address book and Facebook events to its calendar app, and Game Center will import friends from Facebook. Across mobile and desktop, the App Store will include Like buttons so users can see which apps, music, movies and shows their friends Like.

Next week owners of the iPhone 4S, 4, 3GS, the new iPad and iPad 2 will be able to upgrade to iOS 6 for free. The new operating system will come preloaded on the iPhone 5 and new iPod Touch devices.

Images from Apple.

Facebook released an update today for its standalone Messenger app for iOS, which now includes links to view a friend’s Timeline or call their cell phone if it’s been shared in their profile.

The app also allows users to see when their friends were last active to better gauge when they might reply to a message. Like the Facebook for Android version released this week, Messenger 1.9 now supports emoticons in messages.

When users open up a conversation thread, they will see their friend’s name at the top of the screen. If the friend is not currently online, users will see a note about how many days or hours ago the friend was last active. This along with read receipts, which were added to the app in an earlier version, provide social cues to help users communicate more naturally via mobile.

Users can also tap on their friend’s name to pull up a window with the option to view the person’s Timeline or call their phone. Viewing Timeline will redirect the user to the main Facebook app. Clicking “call” will pull up the native phone app for iPhone. The main Facebook for iOS app received a complete overhaul on Thursday, with the app now running twice as fast.