Facebook announced an advertising service targeting mobile developers, intended to enable them to “grow their business with an ad unit that helps them reach and reengage their users”.

Advertisements will be served in Facebook’s mobile apps, and when customers click on an ad, they will be redirected to Google Play or Apple’s App Store to complete the download.

Developers can use the existing App Dashboard to launch ad campaigns, setting criteria such as region, age, gender and budget. The company is also providing tools for campaign monitoring.

The company is currently testing the ad unit with a “limited set of beta partners”.

Facebook said that it has “increasingly become a way for iOS and Android developers to grow their apps”. In the past 30 days, it has sent users to the App Store and Google Play some 146 million times, via clicks from users’ news feed, timeline, bookmarks and its App Center.

Separately, the company also announced the full release of its SDK3.0 for iOS, which had previously been in beta.

New features supported include ready-to-use native UI controls, better session management, improved support for calling Facebook APIs and support for modern Objective-C language features.

In a blog post, Facebook said that the release is “the most significant overhaul of our SDK yet”.