Farmville Mobile Apps

If you’re a fan of Facebook, you’ve come across one of their more popular applications called Farmville. For those of you that need to keep the crops growing and the animals fed on a daily basis, there’s good news. There’s now an app for that.

What is Farmville?

For those that don’t frequently Facebook or do and have never heard of this new game, here’s a brief summary. Farmville is a virtual farm game that first appear on the social networking site in the summer of 2009. The game, which is developed by Zynga, quickly became one of the more popular games on Facebook.

The game play is simple - you create an avatar and then are presented on an animated farm. Here you can plant crops, buy crops and other things. From Facebook, you can invite your friends to be neighbors and even take care of their farm (or vice versa) if they happen to forget to water the field. You can also send gifts and other things to help people’s farms grow.

When a user signs in to their Facebook account (or they are set up to receive notifications about Facebook in their email), they will get notifications about their farm and so forth. The popularity of the game has made over 20% of the site’s users into virtual farmers.

And for some of those users, just being able to log in at their computer at home wasn’t enough. What if one of the animals that have been received or purchased has eaten some of the crops? Or it’s two o’clock and you’re unable to water the field because you’re stuck at work or at school? The answer, my friends, is that Farmville is now mobile.

Farmville Mobile Apps

In June 2010, Zynga launched Farmville mobile apps for those users of the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad. Now Farmville players from Facebook can work their farms while away from their computers.

There are downsides to this of course. Not every one of the 82 million players on Facebook have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or an iPad, so until the application is also available for Windows or Android phones, those users will still need to log into their Facebook profiles to play. That is also another issue - even as a separate application, players will still need to log into their Facebook accounts to play. It actually seems rather an odd choice; if you need to have a Facebook account to play the game, why not just play from your Facebook account? Facebook itself has launched a mobile version of not only its site, but mobile apps for users with smartphones.

The bottom line of course is that those Farmville players who break out in a cold sweat when they can’t farm their farm will at least rejoice at being able to check on it while out shopping or stopping for lunch. And despite only now being for Apple mobile software, there’s nothing that says the app won’t come to other mobile phones. Already, Microsoft has a Farmville app on their MSN games, so users without Apple mobile support may need to wait it out, but may get an app for that too.

Image content - Farmville logo @ Farmville.com