By After Facebook unveiled its Facebook Home, a Facebook-centric home-screen experience that will also be included on the new HTC First, many were eager to get a chance to toy around with it. If our hands-on with the HTC First last week wasn’t enough you may have a chance to install Facebook Home on your own Android device as the APK has leaked. Before we go any further, I must warn you that the experience will be buggy (Chat Heads isn’t working, for instance) and the prerequisites are pretty stiff.
For starters, the device it’s installed on can’t have a maximum resolution higher than 1280×768. This notably excludes many of today’s 1080p offerings, though there are still a good amount of 720p devices floating about that should be just fine. On top of that, your phone must not have a version of the official Facebook app pre-installed. The installation won’t work if another Facebook installation is present on the phone, and since most OEMs who include the app don’t allow you to uninstall it you will need to do it via root (see below) or other methods. Finally, you’ll need to be able to install third-party APKs (though this shouldn’t be a problem for most people)
If you can meet all of those conditions you can give it a shot for yourself. Modaco has the download links you want, and it’s a three part cocktail — the main Facebook “katana” APK, the separate messenger “orca” APK, and the APK for Facebook home. Install all three as you would any APK outside the Google Play Store and you’re set. We’re crossing our fingers that the community can help lift some of these restrictions or get some of the bugs worked out, but don’t hold your breath. Let us know how it’s treating you in the comments below!
[via Reddit]
Method for rooted users with Facebook pre-installed:
- Find the location of Facebook in your system partition (e.g. /system/app/Facebook.apk or perhaps /system/app/Facebook_Client.apk)
- Delete said file (after backing it up!)
- Reboot device
- Install Facebook from the Play Store then uninstall it
- Install above APKs
Wait no one is as excited as I am about using Facebook home?
Here buddy I am edited but waiting for 4 day’s won’t hurt
I think I am as excited for more Facebook stuff as you. Maybe even more so. I don’t know how, but it might be possible.
Nice one Elias, without even having to make a smiley or anything I was able to detect the sarcasm in your text.
Ill play with this.
I think I am good
Do not want.
OH EM GEEEEEE!!!!! SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!
I am like sooooooo excited for like this and stuff? I like can’t wait to like post things on Facebook? Ugh it was like soooooo hard to post pictures of my lunch before and this will totally make it so. much. beTTer!?
cannot “MEH” hard enough
Then “MEH” harder, dammit.
What is the world coming to, when the average internet user can’t “MEH” hard enough for a Facebook Home leak…I weep for the future.
I don’t know what to say about this. I mean the Android Application is alright, but still buggy. Like when I post and try and post or share something, it would have the text from the previous post. Like seriously?
And it’s all like “Friend 1 shared a link on your page” click the notification and all you see is the text. So you want me to scroll through my page to find the link? Usually I click share then click the link from there. But I didn’t have to do that before. It used to show what the link was and everything.
Oh and it get’s worst. “Friend 1 and Friend 2 shared a link on your page”. Click the notification and it shows BOTH or ALL the posts with no picture. So I have no idea what I’m looking at. -_-
Sorry. I’m done ranting. But I don’t think I’m going to waste my time with that Launcher.
Possible to remove built in apps with Titanium Backup as well so there is that option.
FYI it appears the apps are no longer working as FB seems to have shut off access for the leaked version, users are only seeing a black screen now. Will just have to wait for the official release this week.
Yeah, noticed that too. Oh well. Just a few more days until it’s Play Store official.
Sorry I’m not letting FB hijack my phone. I’m happy with Apex and using the crap FB App.