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Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#51

Post by criley »

Scriptor wrote: post #10
flyt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like what your friends post to Facebook then you should reconsider if you want to be friends with them, or if you should begin using the tools FB already provides to control the content in your feed.

Many people use facebook as just another way to communicate with friends, either through messages, wall posts, or event invites. I don't really care if they post uninteresting stuff to their own wall. Actually, it'd be rather sad if I reevaluated my friendships just based on that.

>"Actually, it'd be rather sad if I reevaluated my friendships just based on that."

This is unfair, you responded to someone who was saying "If you want a higher quality stream, then curate more aggressively using the tools available to you"

And I feel like you ignored the meat of his post to make a cheap shot on the idea of "losing friends over memes". That wasn't his point, and I think you knew that. The tools he mentions allow you to control what appears in your feed without unfriending.

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#52

Post by dirkdk »

Interesting. So it is not an OS or UI layer baked into the OS, it is an app with deep integration. In theory you can do it on any Android phone. Starting out with only 5 phones though, so it requires probably a lot of testing and high end specs. They do a lot of things on Android now that you cant on iOS (background processing, replacing Lock and Home screen) that will make Android look better. A lot of interaction that is brand new, and will take time to get to like. In my view, it does turn your phone into a Facebook phone and that might be too much FB for some

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#53

Post by minimaxir »

27182818284 wrote: post #27
minimaxir wrote: post #4

Facebook is touting Facebook Home as a "visually rich stream of media," but all it's going to turn out to be is a feed of filtered food and memes.

I thought something similar, "None of the photos that would come up for me are as great looking as the ones in this demo." To be expected, but you're right, it is going to look totally different and spammy in someone's hands.

Also, the Cover Feed assumes that all photos are portraits or landscapes. That's a dangerous assumption because not all content in s typical photo can fit into a 16:9 rectangle without causing inconsistencies (including the aforementioned square memes)

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#54

Post by patpalombo »

ameen wrote: post #7

The UI while being pretty and having cool animations is actually faulty. Touch targets aren't large enough (comment, like, etc as seen from the demo)

I agree with this, even though I have to admit I kind of like the way they designed and integrated interactions with FB functions (double taps, swipes, ecc) in a launcher.

Overall I think what they are doing here is a really smart choice both with creating something that could turn every android phone in a "FB phone", and with FB certified devices.

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#55

Post by mikeryan »

flyt wrote: post #6
minimaxir wrote: post #4

Facebook is touting Facebook Home as a "visually rich stream of media," but all it's going to turn out to be is a feed of filtered food and memes.

If you don't like what your friends post to Facebook then you should reconsider if you want to be friends with them, or if you should begin using the tools FB already provides to control the content in your feed.

or if you should begin using the tools FB already provides to control the content in your feed.

Is this sufficient? What I want in my feed is likely very different then what I'd want on my phone's homescreen. Now you're getting into google circles territory and I'm not sure that level of curation really works well.

The original point is still valid if its "There's a lot of crap in my feed that I'm okay with that I won't want on my phone's homescreen".

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#56

Post by krschultz »

TannerLD wrote: post #20
dude_abides wrote: post #16

Some serious lack of imagination on Facebook's part. They didn't go the hardware route since it is a lot of work. They didn't go the route of forking Android, since then they would have to partner with hardware manufacturers and that is a lot of work So what do they build instead? A deeply intrusive fork of their App that is not even going to be available on all Androids!

I don't have a great understanding of Android, but what would make them choose to limit the app's current phone options to a handful?

There is a big gap between the phones on Gingerbread (Android API level 10) and post Ice Cream Sandwich (Android API level 15). Supporting older versions requires a lot of support libraries which themselves have some bugs. I kind of have a feeling that pre-ICS level phones is going to be in someways be like supporting IE6 down the road, so Facebook is just avoiding that.

It's also definitely not a 'handful' of phones. As of right now 55% of users are on the post-ICS versions. (http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html). The ecosystem has somewhat consolidated post ICS as well. There are now fewer phones each with more users which makes testing easier.

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#58

Post by jbigelow76 »

nthitz wrote: post #8

Homescreens definitely can improve on phones. A huge multipage listing of Apps I have seems very inefficient. And while I'm nervous with this being from FB, I hope we see more unique home screens popping up.

Agreed, when I read the article I came to the conclusion that Facebook just defined a new "something", not channel but maybe an aspect is a better description, to the app ecosystem.

I hate lauding Facebook but this really seems like they are getting all the upside of forking Android or doing their own hardware with almost none of the downside (massive engineering costs).

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#59

Post by Ologn »

dude_abides wrote: post #16

Some serious lack of imagination on Facebook's part. They didn't go the hardware route since it is a lot of work. They didn't go the route of forking Android, since then they would have to partner with hardware manufacturers and that is a lot of work So what do they build instead? A deeply intrusive fork of their App that is not even going to be available on all Androids!

Android is architected to allow for "deeply intrusive" modifications to the standard Android homescreen. Manufacturers have already done this, as have independent developers like Go Launcher.

As an Android developer, I am happy that I am not seeing yet another Android fork like Kindle Fire, Nook, various Chinese forks etc. I prefer more HTC/Facebook people coming to Play as opposed to setting up yet another app store. If Facebook makes it easy to integrate Intents and such with this (they had some problems in the past), I am sure Android developers will be happy to integrate more with the Facebook API.

I think this is a smart move by Facebook. They started with problems on mobile - junky HTML5 apps which did not integrate well, but as time has gone on they have been making better decisions and doing smarter things. This is just one more good move on their part.

Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

#60

Post by wvenable »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #35
ajross wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The launcher communicates with the rest of the framework through Intents. It's mostly the same point. If the launcher was responsible for the actual app management (launching via zygote, maintenance of the registry and permissions databases, clean up on uninstall...), you'd never be able to replace it. The Intents framework is what allows the launcher to be "just a replaceable app."

I guess you're right, but there's nothing about intents that assumes the homescreen would be replaceable. That the homescreen is launched via intents must have been a conscious design decision, right?

It was definitely a conscious design decision.

It's basically the intent of what happens when you press the Home button. The UI for the end-user is identical as for every other intent (and managed the same way in the settings). If you install a new application that handles the Home intent, the next time you press the Home button you get the usual "What app do you want to use to handle this" dialog with the "Just once" and "Always" options.

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