Introducing Home. By Tom Alison and Adam Mosseri Today we’re introducing Home – a new way to turn your Android phone into a great, living, social phone.
We all want to share and connect. That’s how we discover new information and build meaningful relationships. But today, phones are built around tasks and apps. To see what’s happening with your friends, you pull out your phone and navigate through a series of separate apps. We asked ourselves _if sharing and connecting are what matter most, what would your phone be like if it put your friends first? Our answer is Home. Cover feedFrom the moment you wake up your phone you become immersed in cover feed. You might have missed these updates before, but now they’re a central part of the Home experience. Cover feed is for those in-between moments _like waiting in line at the grocery store or between classes _when you want to see what’s going on in your world. Chat headsWith chat heads you can keep chatting with friends even when you’re using other apps.
Facebook Home revamps any Android phone to make it about 'people, not apps' Facebook's throwing its hat in the Android ring in a big, big way.
Today at an event at the company's campus in California, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Home, a deep software integration with Android that puts Facebook services front and center. Zuckerberg left the HTC First announcement to HTC's Peter Chou, spending more time mentioning ways you could turn your Android phone into something much more social. We spend as much as 25 percent of our time on our phone using Facebook and Instagram, he said, so why not design a phone around "people, not apps? " "We want to build the best experience for every person, on every phone" Home is a family of Facebook apps that overhauls your entire device, turning it into a Facebook phone. Messaging is one of the key features of Facebook Home – Zuckerberg made no bones about believing the way we currently message is broken. The whole setup is very gesture-based, allowing to to switch between apps and notifications pretty quickly.
Previous. Zuckerberg: No ads in Home yet, but they will come to Cover Feed eventually. Facebook Isn’t Forking Android, They’re Spooning With It. Facebook is absolutely, positively, 100 percent not working on a phone.
The first rule of tech news remains intact: when a company says they’re definitely not doing something, it’s as sure a sign as you can get that they will eventually do said thing. “Today we’re finally gonna talk about that Facebook Phone…,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said only slightly in jest to kick off today’s event. He then went on to give the same type of semantics argument he’s been giving for years.
“So we’re not building a phone. And we’re not building an operating system.” And yet. Here’s the thing: you can argue semantics about basically anything in the world. We all knew the Facebook Phone was coming. “You don’t need to fork Android to do this,” Zuckerberg said at the beginning of his keynote. But why does that matter? There’s this negative connotation around the term “forking,” perhaps because a few others, notably Amazon, have forked Android in a way Google probably would not prefer. Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, Money, and the Future of Communication.
Home does put people—your people—front and center.
And Zuckerberg is probably hoping that most users choose it over the standard Facebook app. The catch is that not everyone can participate, even if they want to. At launch, Home is limited to a few Android phones; iPhone users are shut out. Apple enforces its own look and feel, and allowing a developer to take over the lockdown screen is currently unimaginable. But there are plenty of things that were once unimaginable that have come to pass. Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy. One of the great things about attending Facebook’s events is that one gets to see Mark Zuckerberg mature as a chief executive and hone his presentation skills.
And today, he didn’t disappoint in his ability to spin the media corps. It was all claps for “four colors on HTC First” and ideas “inspired” by the likes of Amazon Kindle (ads) and Path. But what he did most brilliantly was obfuscate the difference between an app (Home), the user experience layer and the operating system. Zuckerberg did that for two reasons: First, to buy his company time to build a proper OS that will come to us in dribs and drabs and then will wash over us suddenly, like a riptide. And secondly, to convince people that “Home” is just like any other app. In fact, Facebook Home should put privacy advocates on alert, for this application erodes any idea of privacy. The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. But there is a bigger worry. Facebook Home gets new dock for your favorite apps.