Is Facebook Succeeding on Mobile?

While the social network stopped releasing user counts a year ago, analyst Benedict Evans has uncovered numbers that provide an important insight into the success of Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) mobile efforts: its monthly active mobile users.

As TechCrunch reported, the number of members using Facebook’s mobile applications have increased at greater rate on Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform than on Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone. In September 2011, before the company stopped reporting user statistics, Facebook for Android had 66 million monthly active users (MAUs) and Facebook for iPhone had 91 million MAUs. When the company stopped publishing data in December 2011, Android had surpassed the iOS application, and by November 2012 Android MAUs had grown to 192 billion. In comparison, iPhone MAUs rose to only 147.2 million.

Catalysts are critical to discovering winning stocks. Check out our newest CHEAT SHEET stock picks now.

While the numbers show that Facebook for Android has more absolute users than Facebook for iPhone, those figures are not the whole story; the iPhone has a higher penetration rate than Android. According to the statistics given to the publication by Evans, Facebook’s application is used by close to 73.6 percent of the 200 million iOS users, while only 35 percent of the 550-million-Android users access the app.