

Facebook Home And The Promise Of Android - talhof8
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/facebook-home-and-the-promise-of-android/

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RyanZAG
I don't get the fragmentation argument here - there is nothing about Facebook
Home that prevents it from being used on Android 2.x - all of the functions it
uses are available there. The choice of Android 4+ is simply to make
development easier. This is exactly the same as choosing to only target Chrome
and ignoring IE6, which many new developments (Google included) now do. The
whole argument about the differences between Android and the Web in this case
simply don't hold up, as it's exactly the same situation.

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Zigurd
"Fragmentation" is a horrible name, and sometimes people use it to refer to
problems that don't actually exist, but there is a very serious problem with
Android updates: While iPhone users can expect prompt updates directly from
Apple, Android OEMs and the carriers they do business with effectively make
phones you buy at the carriers' shops nearly impossible to update. That's
horrible, and the Nexus branding and technology program hasn't fixed it. Way
too few Nexus devices, way too many OEMs.

All that said, targeting Android 4.x+ is rational. Facebook Home is going to
push some capacity boundaries. No reason to buy trouble by targeting earlier
revisions.

However, neither my TF300 nor my Nexus 4 are listed as compatible. So Facebook
has somehow taken a crummy situation and made it even worse. It apperently
isn't compatible with all 4.x devices.

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bookwormAT
"However, neither my TF300 nor my Nexus 4 are listed as compatible. [...] It
apperently isn't compatible with all 4.x devices."

It is running perfectly fine on my Nexus 4.

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Zigurd
The Play Store does not offer to install it on my Nexus 4, which is on AT&T
via Straight Talk. All choices are greyed-out.

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ChuckMcM
I think its a pretty insightful point that Android as enabler for third
parties is so good. That point is often missed, even when Amazon showed you
could create a nice new product with it. According to the age poll most people
here won't remember back when MS/PC Dos was mostly a command line and people
like Norton made a "visual shell" which gave you behavior like windows. Later
Microsoft added APIs for windows and then people wrote their own environments
around that too. Similar to the Unity/Gnome/KDE/... differences on Linux, heck
even on the same Debian distro. Historically, its been hard to stay the leader
if other systems can innovate and your system can't. (granted with exceptions)

Bottom line is that the point that Facebook didn't _have_ to make a phone to
make a phone experience is _much more interesting_ than the actual app itself.

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apunic
Disregarding if Facebook Home is a good: Android is rapidly evolving into
directions no one would have imagined 12 months ago.

Nobody has to ask Google for permission what they are gonna do with Android --
no one had to ask what they are doing with the web, either.

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sergiotapia
Wow, just heard about this. I can't imagine installing an App and having it
completely muck up the notification bar, look and feel and more for the phone.

If all you do is use Facebook on your phone then I guess this is magnificent.

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apunic
Me neither. But look at the mainstream, the youth. Mobile, FB and picture
sharing is _the_ new mass media.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is FB's first step into building an own mobile
OS (or own distribution) since the main task of a mobile device is still
communication with close contacts -- and that's all Facebook is about.

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manmal
And I won't be surprised if Facebook OS is a fork of Android.

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lucid00
I see it more likely being a fork of Firefox OS or something new that takes
the same route.

All Facebook should need is a browser for their OS, if they provide a browser
as good as or better than Chrome for Android they should be fine. The Facebook
apps we use on desktop are just browser apps, and it'd be very easy to win
developers over that way, plus the App Center is already there serving web
apps.

And going with the web should help them stay away from competing with partners
like Apple and Microsoft.

All in all their bottom line is Facebook as a service, all they need is to
provide something that brings users to using Facebook more and to see more
ads.

They've likely even thought of this themselves but are waiting it out to see
the web mature more.

