Facebook today lifted the hood on its long-awaited mobile project. It’s not a phone, instead it’s a way of integrating Facebook into the heart of your Android phone. It’s called Home and it makes complete sense.
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While we’ve known that this was what Facebook was likely to release for a little while now, it doesn’t make Home any less important. In fact, it’s far more important than any device running a native Facebook OS could ever have been. Here’s why.
People
According to Facebook, Home is about answering the question “what would your phone be like if it put your friends first?” That’s an important question. After all, your smartphone is little more than a way with connecting with people.
And if you think about it, Facebook is still the place where we connect with our actual friends. When you lose a phone, where’s the first place you go to tell people that they won’t be able to get hold of you for a while? Facebook.
Bringing that experience of the people you choose to broadcast your life to into the core of your smartphone experience makes sense. Our lives are mobile now. Being able to share the story of our lives and see the stories of our friends’ lives should be as easy as possible. Home does that with features such as Cover feed, which replaces the lock screen and home screen. According to Facebook, Cover feed is “a window into what’s happening with your friends” and is designed for “those in-between moments like waiting in line at the grocery store or between classes when you want to see what’s going on in your world”.
It doesn’t have to start from nothing
Speaking of people, the decision to launch on Android also makes a lot more sense than if Facebook had decided to use Home as the basis for its own OS. Allowing Android owners to simply download it means that it doesn’t have to fight for a space in the OS market, which has already seen a number of marginal OSes crowded out by the iOS and Android juggernauts.
Launching on Android also means that Home has the potential to reach a far larger audience in emerging markets than if it had launched on iOS.
It won’t take long to roll out
Facebook isn’t leaving us waiting when it comes to Home. Facebook says that it’ll be ready on certain phones by 12 April. That kind of turnaround time between launch and public roll out would have been a lot more difficult to achieve if it had launched a new OS or its own device the way Google has done with the Nexus series of phones and tablets.
This is the road we’ve been heading down
One of the more innovative things to have happened in the smartphone space over the last few years didn’t come from Android or iOS but Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Its Live Tiles take the app concept into real-time. Facebook Home is the logical extension of that philosophy. Since Home is both your lock screen and home screen, says Facebook, “the content comes right to you. You can flip through to see more stories, and double tap to like what you see”.
While Home includes live updates similar to those found on Windows Phone though, it also has more conventional notifications. They don’t disappear once you’ve looked at them either. “If you don’t want to deal with them right now”, says Facebook, “you can just swipe to hide them and keep flipping through cover feed until you want them back”.
Another example of this is “chat heads”, which apparently allows you to keep chatting with friends when you’re using other apps. According to Facebook, you can move chat heads around and respond to messages. And since SMS is integrated into Facebook Messenger for Android, chat heads include Facebook messages as well as texts.
The aesthetics are there
If Facebook had launched Home with the ability to teleport you to the other side of the world, it wouldn’t have mattered a jot if it didn’t look good. Okay that’s an exaggeration, but the point is, looks matter. Facebook’s clearly understood that. Home actually improves on the look of your standard Android UI. That’s a seriously important factor in making people want to download it.
Facebook needed to evolve
Facebook launched when desktop web usage was at its peak. To date though its mobile efforts have pretty much been aimed at replicating the desktop experience. Home is “mobile first” and changes Facebook from something we check occasionally to something which is about what it was at the start: friends. The difference is you’re no longer chained to a desktop or something trying to replicate the desktop experience on mobile. This is the future of Facebook and it could save the social network from stagnating.
The ecosystem
Facebook apps have existed on the web for a while now, and they’ve been integrated into the social network’s mobile efforts in the past few years. You’ve always got the sense though that the Facebook experience wouldn’t be drastically different without them. You wouldn’t pine after them if they suddenly disappeared. By launching Home as a “not-quite-OS” within an OS, Facebook can better showcase its apps and give them a better chance of succeeding than if it had tried make it alone in the OS wars.
It’s also made sure it isn’t a threat to more traditional Android apps. According to Facebook, Home lets you swipe up to see your apps in the launcher. There’s also a screen containing all of your apps, from which you can “drag your favourite apps to the launcher”.
