Droidfooding: Facebook encourages its staff to switch to Android

Well well. It seems that Facebook has decided to take some proactive steps towards encouraging its employees to think more about Android. Recently companies like Yahoo have taken steps to ensure their staff are using the devices most users have, and Facebook seems to be following suit with a range of posters around its headquarters promoting the switch from iPhone to Android.

Frankly, the move seems a bit delayed: after all, Android is the biggest smartphone OS globally and Google’s most recent stats suggest there are more than half a billion Android devices worldwide. Still, it shows that Facebook is continuing to step up its focus on phones and tablets — which are quickly becoming the dominant type of devices used by its billion plus users, as some 60% of the social network’s monthly active users are logging in via mobile.

According to TechCrunch, if you pop down to 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, you may spot the new posters for what’s been termed Facebook’s ‘droidfooding programme — a contraction of the OS’s name and the slang term ‘dogfooding’, used to describe the practice of using your own product to test out the experience your users are having.

The posters encourage employees to contact the helpdesk for assistance with switching to Android — an interesting move for a company which previously used to give the majority of its employees iPhones. An unnamed spokesperson said that while the iPhone was traditionally the default company phone, its new program doesn’t prioritise one device over another, and lets employees choose what they would like to use.

The idea is that, by having more staff using Facebook’s Android app, bugs and issues can be identified and fixed faster, ensuring that a large percentage of smartphone users won’t be using an app that’s not as good as the iOS one. To drive the urgency home, one poster cites IDC reports which project that the worldwide shipments of Android devices will continue to dwarf iOS shipments by 2016.

Image: TechCrunch