Social media giant Facebook is encouraging its employees to ditch their iPhones in favour of smartphones running Google’s mobile operating system, Android. Despite previously issuing many of their workers with iPhones, Facebook is now encouraging the use of Android in the hope that it will rectify problems and bugs with their heavily criticised Android application.
Following reports in August that the company was gently nudging employees towards Android use, they appear to have stepped up their campaign considerably. Photos have emerged that show propaganda style posters that have been distributed throughout Facebook offices.
One such poster calls for employees to contact their internal helpdesk in order to “switch today” while asking “do you ‘droidfood?” This is a take on the phrase ‘dogfooding’ which refers to the practice of using your own product with the intention of evaluation and improvement.
Another photographed poster features a graph that displays International Data Corporation (IDC) figures on device shipments. The graph extends to the year 2016 and predicts by that time handsets running Android will double that of iPhone.
This news comes shortly after the release of IDC’s Q3 market share data which showed that Android dominated 75% of the market accounting for 136m out of 181.9m smartphones shipped in Q3 of 2012. This represents an astonishing 91.5% year-on-year growth for the Google OS.
IDCs mobile phone researcher, Ramon Llamas, claimed that:
“Android has been one of the primary growth engines of the smartphone market since it was launched in 2008, In every year since then, Android has effectively outpaced the market and taken market share from the competition. In addition, the combination of smartphone vendors, mobile operators, and end-users who have embraced Android has driven shipment volumes higher. Even today, more vendors are introducing their first Android-powered smartphones to market.”
Facebook employees are not being forced to make the switch. However, those that do will have access to the private beta of their new Android application and will be able to report bugs via the tool, “Rage Shake” which utilizes user’s frustration by logging bugs when the phone is violently shaken.
