By Facebook held a huge Android event today, announcing Facebook Home and the HTC First. Allow us to provide you the quick summary with everything you need to know.
Lots of people use the Facebook App.
Until now, phones have focused on “apps.”
Facebook wants to focus on people first, with Apps becoming secondary.
But they’re not announcing a phone, or an app, but an entire experience. Facebook is able to accomplish this through Android’s openness.
Facebook Home is an unlock screen. Swipe between beautiful real-time status updates and pictures every time you look at your phone.
Long press to zoom out on pictures. Double tap to like a status. Or choose from three unlock options by pressing on your face: messaging (left), apps (top), or recent apps (right).
The app drawer is dumbed down – no widgets or folders – but you can choose to replace this app view with a stock Android experience, essentially using Facebook Home only as a lock screen.
Facebook Chat Heads overlay all screens, stacking with multiple messages. Pressing will bring up your conversation.
You can change the location of Chat Heads or turn them off completely.
Facebook home will be available April 12th. Facebook users will be prompted to download the app or can find it in the Google Play Store.
Facebook also announced the Facebook Home Program for Manufacturers and Carriers to incorporate Facebook Home out of the box.
Facebook partnered with HTC and AT&T to announce the HTC First: the first phone to have Facebook Home by default.
Pre-orders start today for $99 and the phone will be available on April 12th.
Hit up our HTC First Forum for more information and if anyone asks you what all this Facebook Phone Home stuff is all about… just link them here!
Twitter is at 2%? I call bullshit
I agree, most people i know have already migrated away from facebook, and basically only use twitter and google+
Twitter is gay and as much as I LOVE G+ no one I know uses it. Don’t have a Facebook anymore either though. Wish google would find a way to get serious traction on g+
I could understand you saying that twitter sucks, but what about it makes it gay? Learn to use words that mean what your trying to say. Also google+ does have a good amount of traction, i guess it just depends on who your friends are…..most of my dev community friends and buddies that know how to use technology are all on g+, but my family that doesn’t know anything besides iPhones and facebook haven’t migrated “yet”
Come on meow….
I wish people would stop using gay to describe pejorative things. Choose another word PLEASE. it just makes you sound ignorant. There are so many other words you could use besides gay. Twitter is neither homosexual nor happy.
Twitter is indeed quite the happy place, what with all the birds chirping.
it would be nice if more people used google+, i use it a lot, but a lot of my friends are on facebook. I dislike facebook with a passion because it’s privacy and annoying constant privacy changes. That’s why I use google+.
Yeah, I call bullshit on that one. Maybe in the official app.
Twitter loads up much faster… I think most of the time people spend using the facebook app is waiting on the thing to show you the latest updates! Twitter on the other hand is snappy! (most of the time)
True…even faster when you use falcon pro!!!
I agree. Wtf
Because the official Twitter app sucks, I use Plume, and I’ve uninstalled Facebook because it bypasses the Play Store to update itself.
As popular as Twitter is, it’s not the “everyone and their grandma” service that FaceBook is. Seriously, my grandma is on FaceBook, and probably yours too. Twitter? They don’t even know what that is.
This is not a bad idea from Facebook. Phones are originally meant to be communication devices afterall but they’ve morphed into gaming and productivity devices. It would be nice to bring communication with others back to the forefront. That said, there’s no way no how I’m integrating facebook into my phone/life to this degree.
free of charge: all your information, tracked by facebook, submitted to microsoft via their partnership. enjoy!
Hey first off!!!
They are sharing all your data with Google as well.
Secondly…
How else are they going to maximize the ads they will be streaming to your phone? On your dime if you do not have unlimited data… I mean sheesh you do not want ads for frying pans if you hate cooking…
Lots of people are saying that because of ‘Facebook Home’ “Facebook will be stealing your data.”
I think they miss the point that if you are on Facebook they already have your data. If you have Facebook on your phone they already have that data. What other data are they going to be able to steal from Facebook home that they can’t get already?
Depending on what access the app gets they could get a lot more info. They could read all of you sms texts, get gps location data, and see who you’re calling. This is one case where I would be very suspicious of all of the permissions the app wants on your phone.
Their normal Facebook App already has permissions for all of that minus SMS text information.
Wait…. So i have to get rid of Nova Launcher that does everything to use this that does one thing?
Doesn’t sound like it. Sounds like you can use the chat heads thing and the lock screen replacement and still use Nova.
On most sites there describing it as a launcher. And some sites are comparing the facebook launcher to Nova and the others. I hope not!
From one of the picture captions in this article.
“The app drawer is dumbed down – no widgets or folders – but you can choose to replace this app view with a stock Android experience, essentially using Facebook Home only as a lock screen.”
I read that as you could still use other launchers. If you can’t then, I’d never even consider even using part of this.
Ok so how does the override work when your phone has a custom lock screen from the maker which requires root and patients to remove? So this will be my lock screen, then when a call comes in I have to navigate through this lockscreen to get to the factory lock screen which will allow me to answer a phone call. (this is how it currently works with my POS LG Revulsion Android phone)
htc shame on you flagship phone will get held up for this crap …also you couldnt come up with a better name than htc “first” and
htc “one”….
No thank you
So is there a new Facebook app update as well, or just this whole Home replacement thing. I like the idea of chat heads floating around but I don’t use Facebook Chat….and there’s no way I want ads (eventually) popping up like they do already in the app.
Meh, maybe I will make my next phone a Samsung. HTC has jumped the shark.
No thanks.
Edit: Should have quoted apparently…
“No thank you” – Paul Sargeant
I can summarize this in one word……FAIL!
Worst. Update. Ever.
This isn’t an update to the current app
Awesome that they can build this type of thing for Android because it is open, but if I’m not a real heavy facebook user it seems it will be very useless. I may try it out just for kicks.
fail
Do Not Want
Will this work on a mac?
I can actually see this being very very useful for a large chunk of android users. Sure, those of us on this site may not like Facebook, but the numbers don’t lie and quite a few people use Facebook. That and obviously quite a few people use Android phones besides the root/crack flasher community. I can see this being very successful actually. I doubt I will use it (lock screen part and chat heads are the only maybe), but I’m sure plenty will really like it.
For major FB users this will be big. However, I use my phone for A LOT more than FB and seems to me that this will only eat up unnecessary battery as its kinda like a real-time super widget.
ROFLMFAO I’ll stick to Apex. Nothing wrong with Nova. Personal preference right now.
Look Zuckerberg, you already hit the pinnacle of relevance. Please, for the love of God, stop “announcing” new stuff!!! .Can’t even get the app right on Android, how the heck is this supposed to work!?!?
You launch FBH… it locks up, you pull your battery if your phone allows it, you curse Facebook, and you uninstall.
Can an app system that integrates so deeply be cleanly uninstalled? This sounds like trying herpes or MS Office. Ain’t no way you’re ever getting all that cruft out and having everything return to normal.
Facebook Herpes…. classic!
How about four words: Android With More Ads
I smell some lie here…people spend more time on twitter than 2%…tf
As tintilating as this sounds i think its a bit far fetched having facebook as your lock screen when initially the lock screen is there so your phone does not do shii that u r not aware off…
Simply waste. Latest Android Jelly Bean is with this feature. In latest Android phones this will be there. Facebook should come out with widget only like Google Plus
I’ll sum up Facebook Home in one word… meh.
It looks and feel a lot like Google+
Sounds cool.
twitter is like the 2nd most popular in JP… no way it’s at 2%
ps: this home thing is just another home replacement.
The only reason the Facebook App percentage time is so high is because the users are looking at their screen waiting for the damn thing to load.
Facebook using mobile architecture bought by Google to expand their ad revenue, for free, and better than Google is.
Both FB Inc and SameSung Mobile make more profit off Android than Google COMBINED gross revenue.
Classic.
Weird, I’ve never seen the first three apps in my battery usage stats. Usually it’s Waze, Winamp, Google Mail, Gmail, Tweetcaster Pro.
“Facebook wants to focus on people first, with Apps becoming secondary.”
I’m tired of people. Do we really need more chit-chat and mindless banter? Like this comment, for example.
I can summarize this in 1 word: bloatware
It absolutely cracks me up all the negative people blabbing “well I think its crap so I’m not going to use it” blah blah blah. Well I have news for those people, just watch Facebook Home become THE most downloaded launcher in the history of Android. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it should’t exist. That’s the beauty of Android. We have the choice and are not told what we can and cannot have. This is a massive win for Android as its completely unique to this platform. Instead of people being so negative, perhaps they should start looking at this as a positive one up over iOS