Facebook Home APK leaks
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