Facebook Announces “Home”, a Homescreen Replacement for Standard Androids on Phones
Facebook today announced a
family of apps you can install called Facebook Home, featuring full
screen photos, status updates, and notifications piped into your
homescreen. It won’t require a forked Android operating system, as
Facebook wants it to be available to a wide audience: “We want to bring
the experience of having a home, of having everything you need right
around you… to your phone.”
After
Home launches on April 12th, if you have the most recent Facebook App
and Messenger on your Android phone you’ll see a banner alert to
download Home from the Google Play store. When you launch it the first
time, you can decide to “try once”, or choose “always” to swap in Home
for you homescreen from then on. Facebook will try to make Home
available on tablets within a few months, and it’s supposed to be a
great experience there. Every month, Facebook will release a Home update
to add new features and make it accessible to new devices.
The
Home home screen experience is focused on Cover Feed, which shows a
constant feed of stories and
photos you can just sit back and watch.
Demo’d by Adam Mosseri, Director of Product, Home also features a new
notifications system that lets you scrub through multiple alerts at
once.
Apps
are important too, Zuckerberg says, so you can still add apps to your
device. One swipe away from the home screen is the launcher for apps.
Messaging is at the forefront. Phones are communication devices and we
spend all day message, in today’s appcentric world, messaging is treated
like another app. Switching between apps is annoying. We want to talk
to people, not apps.
When
a friend messages you, Home brings up the Facebook Chat Heads feature.
It pops up a person’s face and you can tap on their face and bring up a
conversation without losing any context of what you’re doing in the app
behind. Chat Heads means you don’t have to decide whether to read a
message or keep using your current app. It lets communication flow
across the phone experience. It’s designed to let you tap in between
multiple message threads.
“Today
we’re going to finally talk about that Facebook Phone, More accurately,
we’re gonna talk about how you can turn your phone into a Facebook
Phone” Mark Zuckerberg said to start the event. After noting we spend
more than 20% of our mobile time on social apps, Zuckerberg said “We
asked ourselves — if we’re already spending this much time on our
phones, how can we make it easier? What if they were designed around
people first, and you could also just happen to interact with apps?”