GetJAR, Facebook and failed downloads?

GetJAR reports that it has delivered 113m downloads of Facebook mobile apps. This covers Android, Nokia and the J2ME feature phones but not (obviously) iOS, nor preloads of OEM Android apps, which are huge. 

But according to Facebook those three addressable categories ‘only’ add up to around 66m active users. And GetJAR is competing with the Android Market for installs, so there should be even more than 113m Facebook downloads to reconcile with those 66m actives. 

There are two three possible explanations:

  1. a massive failure rate for installs of downloads: 50% or more (i.e.people download the app but then can’t find it or make it work)
  2. a massive featurephone base not showing up in Facebook’s app-by-app stats. However, there isn’t really room in the numbers for this latter: as the charts in my previous post show, iOS, Android and RIM apps account for 210m of the solid 250m mobile users number that Facebook discloses
  3. GetJAR is including application updates in downloads
Benedict Evans