UA-45281186-1

Sharing and Distribution on iOS

Overview

Sharing is a key way that apps use the Facebook platform. For people using your app, sharing helps them tell their stories on Facebook. For developers, sharing helps drive impressions, clicks and installs of apps and makes people aware of your app. A shared story can take two general shapes – a basic link to a news article or photo or a structured Open Graph story about cooking a meal, running a race or reading a book. You can also create a way for apps to create and share "custom" stories using the App Dashboard. Whenever someone shares stories from your app, they appear on the person's timeline and on their friends' news feeds, helping grow the number of people on Facebook who know about and use your app.

Basic link share story

Open Graph story

On iOS (and Android too), apps can share stories in several ways. This document describes those, including the advantages and disadvantages of each along with links to sample code and reference documentation.

• Share dialog
• Feed dialog
• iOS 6 Share Sheet
• Sending Requests
• Publishing via the Graph API
• Best practices

---

Share dialog

The Share dialog is the newest way for people to share stories from apps. It lets apps share rich Open Graph stories and has full support for the Facebook post model, including giving people the ability to tag friends and places. The Share dialog is fully native and provides people the best experience of any of the sharing options. Share dialog can be used by anyone who uses your app, regardless of whether they use Facebook Login to connect an app to their Facebook account. Advantages 100% native for a great, fast share experience Support for sharing Open Graph stories Does not require Facebook Login Disadvantages Apps that use the Share dialog may choose to fall back to the Feed dialog on devices when the Facebook app is not installed Links Using the Share dialog Reference: FBDialogs

---

Feed dialog

The Feed dialog is a web-based dialog that works on all devices at the expense of an optimum experience for people using your apps. Since the Feed dialog opens a web page for sharing, it must start by asking people for their Facebook credentials in order to verify their identity, which disrupts the sharing flow. People are also asked to re-enter their credentials over time as their password changes. The Feed dialog does not support Open Graph and supports only the basic attachment model which includes a link, title/description text and an image. Advantages Available on any device Disadvantages Does not support sharing Open Graph stories Web-based dialog does not offer best experience for people using app People using app must enter their Facebook credentials before sharing Links Using the Feed dialog Reference: FBWebDialogs and Feed dialog

---

iOS 6 Share Sheet

The iOS 6 share sheet is a feature of Apple's Facebook integration. The share sheet lets apps share links and photos but does not support Open Graph stories. Advantages 100% native Disadvantages Share sheet does not support the complete platform attachment model Can only be used if people using your app log in to Facebook via iOS 6 Does not support tagging friends Posts from the share sheet are attributed to iOS by default; contact Facebook to correctly configure attribution for your app Links Ensure your app adheres to Section 4.2 of the Facebook Platform Policies and does not pre-fill the Share Sheet "user message" field by initializing initialText with content that wasn't entered by people earlier in their use of the app Using the Share Sheet Reference: FBDialogs