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MGF 2011: We hope HTML5 will be a game changer for mobile says Facebook

Not the holy grail for games though

MGF 2011: We hope HTML5 will be a game changer for mobile says Facebook
Kicking off the second day of the Mobile Games Forum 2011 was Christian Hernandez, head of international business development for Facebook.

"Mobile is one of our key priorities," explained Hernandez, who previously worked at Motorola and Google.

"We have around 200 million mobile users. Our mobile users are twice as engaged as web users."

For that reason, Facebook is building out the range of devices it supports, moving from smartphones to ensure that feature phone users in emerging markets can also use Facebook. For that reason, it's recently rolled out a Java app in a number of countries.

In the future however, Facebook is looking towards HTML5.

"We've been making a lot of noise about HTML5 as a strategic decision," said Hernandez. "It's not a holy grail, especially for gaming, but makes it less painful to go cross-platform.

"For mobile, we hope it will be a game changer."

Building a platform

In terms of supporting mobile developers, Facebook is ensuring it will provide similar support as it has for web developers.

"We relaunched our mobile SDK last year to provide the ability to access the social graph within the mobile app," Hernandez said.

"Enabling single sign-on was the big deal as it reduces friction point so users can get straight into apps that work on top of Facebook."

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.