

Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android - trevin
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/facebook-home-launch/

======
51Cards
My initial thoughts (without having a ton of time to really absorb this yet)
is that Apple's closed operating system may have just become a liability. The
open 'intent' model of Android is really at the core of making something like
this possible. In turn though does this also allow Facebook to take over "too
many" aspects of Android and cut into Google's revenue streams as well? All
things I'm still pondering.

As an aside... I am a big HTC fan. Nice to see them able to get on board at
the ground level of some new projects.

~~~
yalogin
You seem to assume this is something people want. This is just an app trying
to take over the whole OS experience. Being closed system is a good thing in
this case as I don't want facebook to change my OS experience. I like apps to
behave like apps. In fact I would go as far as saying that this is one way
Android could become sucky over time - Too many apps trying to push for a new
experience.

~~~
smackfu
A good percentage of my friends spend 90% of their phone/tablet time inside of
the Facebook app too. They don't use RSS or Twitter or go to actual websites.
They just follow people or sites that post stuff, and then read it from
Facebook. I can't see why they wouldn't want the Facebook app even more
prominently featured.

------
isopod
The giant gap between the beautiful photos of beautiful people doing enviable
things in beautiful places used in demos such as these (and in Apple ones as
well) and the mundane, poorly-focused, washed-out, ill-composed photos and
meme reposts that are most likely to appear on your FB feed at any given
moment always takes the shine off of products such as these for me, despite
how much more useful or technologically advanced they may be from their
predecessors. Being reminded my life is not going to be as exciting as the
floor model is never a good user experience.

~~~
psbp
Exactly. How terrible will this be when you're not in the mood to socialize or
when something discouraging happens in your social life? This has a good use
case for 10% of smartphone users maybe 80% of the time.

I'm going to predict that this will turn people off of facebook more than it
creates more engagement.

------
mladenkovacevic
Facebook is betting that people don't want to interact with apps but rather
with their friends, which is a bet they have to make because, well they're
Facebook. This also sounds very good and "human" but I don't know how true to
reality it is.

Apps are a way to gauge and guide intent. So if I want to send an email, I
open an email app. If I want to check my schedule, I open the calendar app.
These are established and agreed upon concepts and apps are just
representations of those concepts. With Home, Facebook is saying that every
time you turn on your phone "you probably want to see what your friends are up
to." This assumes that we're all super social and are genuinely interested in
people in our Facebook-lives. I think many people use Facebook out of a sense
of obligation to be part of that scene (kind of like LinkedIn). But there
probably are a lot of people who instinctively hit that Facebook app as soon
as they turn on their phone and for them this will be great. I don't think it
will drive more usage from that first group, though (and I think that should
be Facebook's primary goal).

~~~
potatolicious
I don't think the two concepts are mutually exclusive.

I've noticed with myself that no matter what I'm doing, and what apps I'm
using on my desktop, Facebook is _always_ open in a tab.

Which is to say, my high-intent and highly-guided behavior on the computer
sits on top of a constant baseline social presence.

Personally I'd be happy if Facebook Messenger was built into the phone such
that I can respond to messages without breaking my flow in my current app. But
I'm on iOS, so I'm really not holding my breath.

Putting social networking into the background IMO aligns it closer to how I
actually use it. Facebook as a high-intent application doesn't seem to work
_quite_ right.

------
mik3y
Setting aside the Launcher replacement, the most technically surprising aspect
of this demo was the messaging app: it showed avatars and a messaging window
hovering above the currently-focused app.

As far as I know, this isn't possible on stock Android. You can make a non-
fullscreen window, but you can't continue to interact with the layer behind
it.

This may be the motivation for the "set of OEM guidelines" Mark very casually
mentioned. I wonder what other enhancements they call for..

~~~
andrewmunn
Actually chat heads works on stock Android! Not sure the exact wizardry that
went into implementing it, but it's very impressive to use.

~~~
shagrath
probably like explained here:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8073803/android-multi-
tou...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8073803/android-multi-touch-and-
type-system-overlay)

but imho, given they already downgraded the behavior in 4.0, this is really
looking like a security hole that might be closed in a next Android release.

------
minimaxir
Facebook is touting Facebook Home as a "visually rich stream of media," but
all it's going to turn out to be is a feed of filtered food and memes.

~~~
flyt
If you don't like what your friends post to Facebook then you should
reconsider if you want to be friends with them, or if you should begin using
the tools FB already provides to control the content in your feed.

~~~
vowelless
> If you don't like what your friends post to Facebook then you should
> reconsider if you want to be friends with them

That seems like an over-reaction. My friends posting stupid memes on facebook
has little bearing to my friendship to them.

~~~
flyt
Correct. See the second part of my post.

------
jboggan
I only want this if Zuck's smiling face is at the bottom center of my phone,
all the time.

Still, does Facebook having more integration into every aspect of our digital
experience really improve our quality of life? I feel like we are already well
into an uncanny valley of Facebook saturation.

~~~
arnorhs
I guess you could change your facebook profile photo to be Mark's face.

To your question it comes down to whether or not you feel like Facebook
improves our quality of life, and whether or not its effects are not already
maximized. If you answer yes to both those questions, having Facebook more
deeply integrated into your phone might help to maximize the benefits.

Also, if you spend 90% of your time on your phone on Facebook (I don't but I'm
sure most geeks are not an accurate representation of the normal user) then
you might prefer to have a deeply integrated Facebook phone with _access_ to
other apps/services on top of that.

~~~
jboggan
I just want an app that actually makes me the person I appear to be on
Facebook.

------
donaldguy
I'm really sad about the still-all-too-walled-garden:

The ideas of active information at a glance is cool, but honestly, for it to
be really useful for me, I don't want just FB, and definitely not just photos.
I'd be happier with some Flipboard-style article previews, and I'd like some
of that information to come from Twitter, Reddit/HN, or even ( _gasp_ )
Google+.

Similarly chatheads are pretty cool, but with my current set of frequent
conversation-partners, it wouldn't be all that useful to me without letting
google talk/babble into the mix. (though I appreciate they at least included
SMS).

I am also _REAL_ concerned about all the content visible on the lock screen:
if you misplace your phone, suddenly all your friends' "friends only" posts
are "friends + that guy who found/stole my friend's phone".

... and overall I'm just fundamentally torn. On the one hand the whole idea
just screams "Digiphrenia". Their own advertisement supported this better than
I could articulate. On the other hand, I still fundamentally am excited about
the base idea of keeping people actively connected and am pretty onboard for
the people-first focus.

~~~
smackfu
Flipboard is certainly welcome to develop that. I'm not sure why Facebook
would do it.

------
jcomis
I do think replacing the launcher was a smart idea, but I'm just not sure if
that kind of integration is useful in FB's case. Maybe I'm a minority, but I
just don't route my life through FB and do not want to, at all. This only
seems useful to people who exclusively use their phone for FB. Why would I
want a layer of FB between me and the home screen where all my other apps
live?

The UI did look pretty slick, though at times it seemed like some elements
were quite tiny for touch targets.

Overall: I really loathe the term "chathead"

~~~
drivingmenuts
Depends on what sort of permissions FB asks for on install.

My suspicion is that they'll want everything they can get their hands on
(location at a minimum). Eventually, they're going to want to replace your
phonebook, etc.

The sad thing is, people will just let them.

~~~
mik3y
> Depends on what sort of permissions FB asks for on install.

That's the nice thing about being pre-installed on Android: there's no asking
for permission.

(And you get access to SIGNATURE_OR_SYSTEM permissions, too.)

~~~
drivingmenuts
Do I trust Google with that information? I used to and now it's probably too
late.

Do I trust FB with that information? Oh, hells no.

------
nthitz
Homescreens definitely can improve on phones. A huge multipage listing of Apps
I have seems very inefficient. And while I'm nervous with this being from FB,
I hope we see more unique home screens popping up.

~~~
cmbaus
I think Facebook is moving in the right direction on this, but I do agree that
it is concerning that Facebook could become the jump off point for users.

------
ameen
Facebook Home IMO might as well have been targeted towards the teen crowd.
They would eat this up. The most used apps on their devices usually are
Facebook, Messaging, Twitter, Instagram, Browser.

------
mikeleeorg
There are some interesting parallels to the Windows Phone UI here. As I
understand it (and I don't own a Windows Phone), Microsoft's intent was to
provide a UX that is more social and tied to user tasks rather than apps.
Facebook Home looks like they use a similar underlying concept, with a
stronger focus on social interactions rather than user tasks. Apps are still
there, but are not the main focus.

I rarely use the Facebook app on my phone, so I'm not their target audience.
However, I've seen a fair number of teens and young adults absorbed in the
Facebook app on their Android phones (yup, Android, more than iPhones, because
they're cheaper). So it will really be interesting to see if that audience
takes to Facebook Home too.

------
itsprofitbaron
I think that this is a _smart_ move by Facebook building a layer over Android.
At least at this stage anyway because, they’ve now positioned themselves in a
great position because they’ve made it harder for Google to go back on the
openness of Android which has allowed them to build Facebook Home in the first
place. Likewise, if carriers and users devote a lot of time to the application
then, Facebook have bought themselves time to eventually fork Android and
create a new revenue stream like, Amazon have done with the Kindle.

------
Aardwolf
"Phones are communication devices and we spend all day message, in today’s
appcentric world, messaging is treated like another app."

Seems like I'm not the target audience. I've had some form of cell phone for
12 years now, and I always needed the cheapest possible account/prepaid thing,
because I don't call/SMS enough. If they gave 1000 SMSes, I guess I had like
990 left at the end of the month.

Until now that is. Now suddenly there is a resource in the cell phone accounts
I need lots of: data. Not to message and stuff, but to browse the internet. My
most common form of communication on it is on forums and email replies I
guess.

So phones got useful for people who don't communicate much over a phone? :)

~~~
smackfu
For perspective, the target audience often will not even know a person's email
address.

------
nollidge
Why?

EDIT: seriously, why? Were people really clamoring for _more_ Facebook in
their lives?

~~~
gknoy
I wouldn't mind Facebook messaging being more tightly integrated with my text
messaging interface. My android phone lets me put text messages as a widget on
my lock screen, for example -- but I can't do that with FB messages, which is
something I use a lot more than SMS. Nearly everything else about Facebook I
could care less about, but FB messaging is something that my wife and I use a
LOT.

~~~
tolle
You can use their messenger app for SMS as well. Might solve your issue, but
I'd imagine that there is some drawbacks. I have not tested it myself.

------
dirkdk
Interesting. So it is not an OS or UI layer baked into the OS, it is an app
with deep integration. In theory you can do it on any Android phone. Starting
out with only 5 phones though, so it requires probably a lot of testing and
high end specs. They do a lot of things on Android now that you cant on iOS
(background processing, replacing Lock and Home screen) that will make Android
look better. A lot of interaction that is brand new, and will take time to get
to like. In my view, it does turn your phone into a Facebook phone and that
might be too much FB for some

------
mik3y
Those surprised that Facebook didn't "fork" Android are missing the point: A
fork of Android from FB will not probably look like a new OS, but rather a new
distribution channel (Play store).

Play is the biggest leverage Google has against OEMs, and FB has to consider
that Google could drop any of these apps at a moment's notice (make up a
reason).

Here, FB now has a pliant OEM (HTC) and the beginnings of an OEM integration
program (it was mentioned in the talk).

How hard would it be for FB to build an app store, as a contingency if nothing
else?

------
bane
Considering the craptastic experience the regular FB app is on Android
(seriously, visiting FB in the _browser_ is a better experience), I feel a
definite "meh" about this news.

------
suyash
It will track all your data now, this app come installed from OEM's like HTC
which would be hard to uninstall and would track all over information all the
time. #privacyconcern

~~~
3825
The promise with Ice-cream Sandwich was that you can disable any pre-installed
app regardless of the skin. They would still take up storage space but for all
intents and purposes, they don't exist. From an OEM's point of view, is there
a way to circumvent this and still have access to Google Play Store?

------
ereckers
I see some people in the comments mentioning, "This is like the native
capabilities of a Windows Phone". Without using it I don't know for sure, but
I can see that take.

------
kellyhclay
Facebook has always wanted to collect as much personal information from its
users as possible. This is a brilliant move to get this data the easiest way
possible - they didn't even need create their own phone or even their own OS.
Android users - especially teens - will eat this up and FB will instantly be
able to gather all the info they want without the target demographic even
thinking about the privacy implications.

------
bsbechtel
Facebook has done a great job in recent years developing ways for individuals
to absorb more content created by their friends. However, they don't seem to
be doing much to encourage people to share or post engaging content....as a
data point of one, I find myself sharing things on Facebook significantly less
often than I did last year at this time.

------
crapshoot101
Seems like a first step towards a pure-play FB OS, no? Built on Android? Those
of you with a significantly greater technical understanding than me (aka,
everyone here) may have a better take of what's possible.

------
thechut
Great, now Facebook can serve ads straight to my phone home screen too.

------
epo
Facebook's Segway moment?

------
cadetzero
Wow, they built this when their Facebook app on android still consumes an
ungodly amount of system resources?

I have no faith in this from a technical perspective.

~~~
Taylorious
I have to agree. This whole thing puzzles me. The Android FB app is terrible.
Absolutely terrible. Some basic functions don't work. Like when someone tags
me in a photo and a notification pops up, I click the notification and their
app crashes. It can't display a friggin picture from a website. FB is just a
website, how can they not get their own app to work with their own website?

Seriously if you cant make an app in Android that works, how are you going to
roll your own version of the OS?

------
Mahn
Looks interesting, but I don't really see it taking off. I just can't picture
normal people thinking "wow, this is just what I needed, I'm so downloading
this!"

------
fimoreth
Is there any word on if facebook will be including advertisements in this at
all? It looks very sleek, but having ads come up would be a huge deterant.

------
ameen
The UI while being pretty and having cool animations is actually faulty. Touch
targets aren't large enough (comment, like, etc as seen from the demo)

~~~
patpalombo
I agree with this, even though I have to admit I kind of like the way they
designed and integrated interactions with FB functions (double taps, swipes,
ecc) in a launcher.

Overall I think what they are doing here is a really smart choice both with
creating something that could turn every android phone in a "FB phone", and
with FB certified devices.

------
ryanhandby
Before we all "lose our minds" keep in mind, FB is a slow player. There will
be something, an extension of this that im sure will be simply awesome.

~~~
wutbrodo
Are they a slow player? I can't think of many examples of them doing something
that seemed like they were playing the long game (this is no doubt in part due
to the fact that they're relatively young as a company).

------
iSnow
At $99, that's a great offer. I wonder if you can install ICS instead of FB
Home.

~~~
3825
I would take the unlocked $349 Nexus 4[1] over a $99 device with a two-year
contract.

[1]:
[https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_16g...](https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_16gb)

------
gouthamvel
is anyone else getting a 404 not found when you click on "PRE-ORDER THE HTC
FIRST" at <http://facebook.com/home>

------
philfreo
So does Google like this or hate this?

~~~
fizzbar
Hates it with the fire of a thousand suns. All those ad impressions, all
skipping right over the Google-supplied (and now invisible) OS...

Now spending every moment they have with their device basically entirely in
Facebook.

------
dude_abides
Some serious lack of imagination on Facebook's part.

They didn't go the hardware route since it is a lot of work.

They didn't go the route of forking Android, since then they would have to
partner with hardware manufacturers and that is a lot of work

So what do they build instead? A deeply intrusive fork of their App that is
not even going to be available on all Androids!

~~~
TannerLD
I don't have a great understanding of Android, but what would make them choose
to limit the app's current phone options to a handful?

~~~
krschultz
There is a big gap between the phones on Gingerbread (Android API level 10)
and post Ice Cream Sandwich (Android API level 15). Supporting older versions
requires a lot of support libraries which themselves have some bugs. I kind of
have a feeling that pre-ICS level phones is going to be in someways be like
supporting IE6 down the road, so Facebook is just avoiding that.

It's also definitely not a 'handful' of phones. As of right now 55% of users
are on the post-ICS versions.
(<http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html>). The ecosystem
has somewhat consolidated post ICS as well. There are now fewer phones each
with more users which makes testing easier.

