Kyle Russell/Business Insider
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook announced a bunch of new tools for app developers last week at its F8 conference, and when you step back and take a look at what they all mean, it appears that CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have pulled off a stroke of strategic genius.
Everything he announced has one thing in common: It takes full advantage of the secrecy surrounding the way Apple's App Store and the Google Play store on Android rank and feature apps, which are the goldmine for app developers.
Zuckerberg is literally going to start monetizing their lack of transparency.
Some people got really excited about the new app-to-app "deep linking" ability that Facebook is giving to app makers. It's a technical change that allows a person using one app to tap a link and go directly into another app without one of those awkward stopovers on the mobile web.
But that's not the most interesting bit.
Personally, I thought the new anonymous Facebook login — which will let people access apps without revealing their identity to anyone — was the most exciting development. People will be able to try out new apps without their Facebook accounts broadcasting to the world their outre tastes in mobile content. App developers will like the fact that it opens up a whole new audience of nervous-nelly downloaders.
But that's not the crucial bit, either.
And then there was the offer of $30,000 of free services to new developers, and the Facebook Audience Network that offers advertising on apps outside Facebook but using Facebook's targeting data.
On their own, they're all neat, but of real interest only to developers and coders.
Normal people can roll over and go back to sleep.
Why Zuck mentioned Apple and Google
... Except for the part where Zuck referenced Apple and Google: "The majority of our business is on mobile," he told 2,000 developers at F8. "But it can be annoying to build on mobile because it is so siloed. Apple, Google and Amazon all have their own platforms. ... No one has been incentivized to help people build apps that work on all these platforms."
That, right there, is the key to Facebook's new strategy on mobile. Nobody knows exactly how or why apps rise and fall inside Apple's App Store and Google Play.
And Facebook is going to fix it.
App store rankings appear to be a combination of total downloads, review ratings, and monetization. But no one knows for sure. On top of that, apps are "featured" in the stores via editorial choices from the mysterious staffers who run the app store. It's unknown how that works, or who really does it. (They might be picking apps by meeting at a spooky abandoned castle on a dark and stormy night, carrying candles and wearing monks' cowls, for all we know about how to get an app featured in Apple's App Store.)