Facebook is moving away from its former transparency. The social network announced upcoming changes in the public display of MAU applications integrated with the platform.
In the near future, the Facebook page of the application will not display accurate, albeit rounded up to tens of thousands of information about the number of unique users who have logged into the application at least once during the month. Instead, an approximate number will be displayed for the following “checkpoints”: 10 000, 50 000, 100 000, 500 000 and up to 10 million and its place in the top.
For example, Facebook, instead of displaying information that about 680 thousand people play in Clash of Clans per month, will report that there are more than 500 thousand users. This innovation applies only to the public publication of figures. The developers themselves will still be able to monitor the specific MAU of their projects.
Such a rejection of the former transparency resembles in many ways the approach of Google, which displays the approximate number of downloads on the Google Play application page: “from 1000 to 5000”, “from 5000 to 10,000” and so on. Inside Mobile Apps journalists attribute Facebook’s decision to the desire to protect public companies from too close attention of market analysts and competitors.