Technologizer

Facebook Asks Staffers to Dump Their iPhones and Use Android

The social-networking giant plants posters around its campus urging employees to go Android.

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In the Bay Area, where so much mobile software is developed, the iPhone's market share is an impressive 100%. Well, not really. But it can sure feel that way. Sometimes when I'm riding the subway, I scan the many mobile devices being used by my fellow passengers; quite often, there isn't a non-Apple product in sight.

This may be one factor which helps explain why Android apps often aren't as nice as their iOS equivalents: The people who make 'em don't actually use 'em. But as TechCrunch's Josh Constine notes, Facebook is on a mission to convert employees to Android, in hopes of collecting better testing data:

I’ve attained some photos of the vaguely propagandistic posters found around Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. The most telling one is a graph of the International Data Corporation’s projection for shipments of Androids vs iPhones. It shows Google’s OS getting bundled with twice as many devices as Apple’s by 2016. If Facebook can’t even out the ratio of iOS to Android-toting employees soon, it could end up neglecting the vast majority of its smartphone app users.