Facebook wants to make mobile payments easier, and said it is working with AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, T-Mobile USA, Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, and Softbank Mobile on ways to streamline mobile transactions.
When developers incorporate Facebook’s pay dialog into their apps, this functionality will automatically be enabled where carriers support it.
Facebook joined the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group, in which more than 30 hardware manufacturers, carriers, and developers aim to improve and standardize mobile browsers.
The social network also said it would make its mobile browser test suite, Ringmark, available to the group to help it with testing which mobile browsers support the functionality in their applications.
And furthering last week’s app discovery announcement, the social network said it will soon extend its functionality to native Android apps.
Facebook added in a post on the developer blog about the social network’s presence at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona:
To help developers reach more people, we’re committed to providing distribution across all platforms. The open graph, combined with news feed and timeline, helps people discover new apps through friends, regardless of the technology stack used.
We see more people accessing Facebook on the mobile Web than from our top native apps combined, so we know the mobile Web is important for reach. So why aren’t more people building apps for the mobile web? We hear from developers that there are three challenge areas that make it hard to build on the mobile Web: app discovery, mobile browser fragmentation, and payments.
When you build for the mobile web today, it’s hard to know which browsers and devices will support your app, which is why we’re proud to be joining over 30 device manufacturers, carriers, and developers in an industrywide effort to help accelerate the improvement and standardization of mobile browsers: the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group. For developers, this makes it easier to understand your app’s potential reach and to help prioritize which browser capabilities are important to you.
We’re working with operators around the world to minimize the number of steps needed to complete a transaction in mobile Web apps, which will make it easier for hundreds of millions of people worldwide to purchase apps on their device via operator billing. This will be automatically enabled where carriers support it when you integrate the pay dialog into your app.
Our hope is that these initiatives — the open graph, the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group at the W3C, and our partnerships with carriers to improve mobile payments — will enable developers all over the world to build mobile experiences that improve the lives of billions of people.
