How to invite all facebook friends from ios or android app after ios sdk 3.2

11
votes

I'm trying to find a best way to send invitation to facebook friends from iOS App. In the recent api release, I found facebook is restricted the invite policy.
After searching around, I summarize my finding here:

Feed (Graph API user/feed) is used to post message on user's own wall, then friends could seen from their own portal if the feed has mention the friends.

  • Pro: message could be customized and including pictures etc.
  • Con: mention 10 people max, also need user interaction in app.
  • If user just post a message in their own wall, only friends comes to his page could see it, but not possible for notifying friends.

Request (Graph API user/apprequests) is used to send an request directly to friends, there are two kinds of request: User to User and App to User

User to User request scenarios (I'm interested in the first scenario)

  • The recipient is a friend of the sender and has not installed the app. This is considered an Invite.
    • Pro: Seems the proper way of invite, friends will receive notification and popup.
    • Con: Includes maximum 50 friends, and also need user interaction.
  • The recipient is a friend of the sender and has installed the app.
  • The recipient has installed the app. In this case the sender and recipient do not need to be friends.

App to User Request: friends will receive a message from the app, but the message is only sent to user who already has the app installed, so this is not useful to me.

So it seems my best shot is to use User to User request. So my app could provide user a list of 50 and ask him/her to confirm sending in the facebook webdialog. But what if user want to request to all their friends, sometimes 500+. Seems facebook is tighten this up to promote their Mobile App Install Ads, or App Center. Ads is another topic. I already have the App Center setup, but how should I let user's friends know about this?

I've been searching for three days, but couldn't get a ideal solution. Folks, suggestions or solution? Thanks in advance!

1
iosfacebookfacebook-graph-api
Well, I'm glad it's not so easy anymore for applications to spam every single friend of a user. – Lix
You will not find a solution without user interaction... – Lefteris
LOL, I feel the same way as a user. However, as a developer, I'm hoping there's some instructed way of doing this, ie. ask user permission to do it if the user want to do it. To me, it's just facebook way of shutting this down and get more people to pay their mobile ads. – wao813

1 Answers

2
votes

I've been looking into ways to do this myself and my strong suspicion is that Facebook are trying to discourage / deprecate this feature.

They haven't yet updated the 'Requests' system into their new API (you have to include the old headers to do it), despite pretty much all other features being ported over to the new system.

As you mention, they now have mobile app install ads which they're quite keen to push

And finally, Open Graph: personally, whilst as a developer I'd love to give people the option for people in my app to invite their friends over Facebook, as a user I can see why this would be annoying.

There's a large potential for these requests to be spammy if sent to many users at a time, and also they're quite unnatural, they go against the idea of OG which is that, your friends actions are fluidly put onto their wall where you can see it and choose to investigate / install the app yourself if it sounds interesting.

i.e. the idea now is that app promotion on Facebook is done more naturally and encouraged by usage rather than explicitly forcing requests