There's been a lot of flirting going on in recent months between Apple and Facebook. In February, Apple CEO Tim Cook told a group of investors that Facebook was "the one company that is closest to being like Apple". Last week, Apple did a big App Store promotion for Facebook's new Camera app, and clearly knew about it well beforehand. Then, of course, there were Cook's comments at the D10 conference earlier this week. "Facebook is a great company." "And the relationship is solid." Not to mention the ever-provocative "stay tuned."
 

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Now the two sides appear on the brink of formalizing the relationship. After much speculation, Facebook integration will indeed be baked into the latest version of iOS, we've learned.

Following Cook's most recent comments, there was much speculation about this finally happening. After all, Facebook integration did appear in an unreleased build of iOS 4 a couple years ago. But much like the Facebook/Ping integration, this fell by the wayside and Apple instead went with Twitter as the main third-party authentication and sharing service in iOS 5.

To be clear, Twitter will still very much be a part of the new iOS (presumably named "iOS 6″ and codenamed "Sundance"), and that company will be holding sessions at WWDC to chat more about the continued partnership (including the integration into the forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion). But Facebook integration will be very important for iOS -- tons of apps use Facebook for sign-ups and authentication (many use Facebook as the only way to do this, to the dismay of some). Apple was undoubtedly watching this activity and realized that it was time to formally bring Facebook on board.

Source: Tech Crunch