Facebook Introduces Facebook Home, Making its Way to Google Play on 12 April
Facebook has recently announced it’s all new Facebook Home for Android, a new suite of apps for the platform. Facebook’s objective with the new Home is to give people a phone experience that’s built around them rather than apps. In order to achieve that the company replaced Android’s lockscreen and homescreen with the new Cover Feed – that displays a slide show of photos and stories instead of the usual widgets and app icons.
The Cover Feed will display full screen photos and other stories shared by your friends and family. Links and other updates will also be displayed on the entire display, and if there are no photos with the update, user’s cover photo will be displayed instead.
The new homescreen allows users to yap and hold on to a photo to see the entire picture, double tap it to like the update and tap on the icon to comment on it; pretty similar to what they’re used to with the standard Facebook app.
At the bottom of the screen are the user’s profile pics that can be swiped to launch apps quickly. Facebook Home also allows users to bookmark their favorite apps for quick use or they can launch any app from the app drawer. The app drawer also includes shortcuts to post a statues update, photo or a check-in to the social network.
Notifications on the Cover Feed look almost similar to that of iOS, with bars that show the previews of the notifications and icons for the apps. Users can then either swipe the notifications away to get to them afterwards or open them right there.
Although, when using an app, the standard menu bar for Android shows up on the top to give you notifications and stuff; but Chat on the other hand works differently.
Facebook Home’s Chat feature utilizes the Facebook Messenger for both SMS and FB messages. When a message is received, the sender’s profile pic appears in a bubble on top of the message, where users can either tap it to respond to the message without having to leave their current app, or they can swipe the bubble to get rid of it.
The Facebook Home will be available on Google Play store for select Android devices starting from April 12. At first, it will only work with HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Although, it will make its way to more devices over time. HTC has also released a new phone dubbed as HTC First that will come preloaded with Facebook Home out of the box.
What do you think about Facebook’s new Home on Android? Do you think it has what it takes to make users replace Stock Android with? Let us know.