Developers could soon be able to add a Like button to their iOS apps

This is pretty neat. Developers will soon be able to add a Facebook Like button to their iOS apps.

As announced at Facebook’s F8 developers’ conference, the feature is currently only available in preview mode and can only be used by developers and testers of the apps, meaning that it’s not quite ready for deployment in the app store.

What the embedded Like button will effectively do is connect your app with the user’s Facebook app, meaning that they can Like and share content from it just as they would from a website with an embedded Like button their desktop.

“The Like Button,” Facebook says “is the quickest way for people to share content with their friends. A single click on the Like button will ‘like’ pieces of content from your app and share them on Facebook.”

Here’s what the embedded button would look like in an app:

When the Like button is tapped, it will fast-app-switch to the Facebook app and present the Like Dialog. Here is what the Like Dialog looks like:

When one of the buttons is tapped, it will return to your app and update the state of the like button along with the like count and/or sentence, if present.

Before you can embed the Like button, you’ll need to make sure you have a few things sorted out:

• Your environment set up.
• A Facebook app properly configured and linked to your iOS app.
• The Facebook SDK added to your project.
• Your Facebook app ID and display name added to your app’s .plist file.
• The Facebook iOS app must be installed on the device.

It’s unclear exactly what kind of timeframe Facebook is looking at before taking the feature to full scale. If it takes off however, you can pretty much bank on everyone else in the social space following suit.