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Facebook Launches "Home" For Android
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook has announced "Home" for Android smartphones (and, eventually, tablets). It's something less than a full Facebook mobile operating system, as some expected before the company's presentation, and more like an app update. Facebook also announced the Facebook Home Program, which will work with several carriers and device makers to pre-load Home onto select devices, including ones built by Samsung, Sony, ZTE, and Lenovo. The first "Home" phone will be the HTC First, a $99.99 phone that will ship April 12 from AT&T. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told analysts and journalists assembled for his presentation that Home was designed to reorient the phone and the Facebook mobile experience around people, not apps: "On one level, Home is the next mobile version of Facebook. On the other, it's a change in the relationship with the next generation of computing devices." Home essentially is a custom start screen for your Android phone, replacing the home screen with one centered on Facebook. While users can access other Android apps on the phone, the focus is on those apps that run on the Facebook platform. Home can also be enabled as a lock screen." Reader RougeFemme points out that France Telecom/Orange will be the first carrier in Europe.
No thank you.
The last 15 years of internet dominance have been neat, but it seems like all of the "inventions" are clever ways to interact with each other. Entertainment and consumer products are booming, but what actual technologies are we inventing? Or to put it another way: what opportunities have gone past while we've been inventing toys and minting teenage millionaires?
a Home phone.
Marketing genius. E.T. phone home.
Hey homes did you get a new Home phone? Yeah but I left it at home.
*goes back to work*
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
It's like razors and blades, and the users are the blades...
This article is just one big press release.
From the “Home” screen, users can swipe left and right to access the user’s News Feed (now renamed “Cover Feed”). Users can comment and Like images, which are blown up to the size of the screen. Videos won’t be shown, group posts won’t show up, and there won’t be any ads—at least at first. Swiping the screen down brings up the app drawer (Android apps, said a Facebook product manager who asked not to be named) instead of apps designed to run atop the Facebook platform.
WHy is Facebook doing this? Why do they do anything?
What is their profit center?
Your data. This is just a ploy to gather data about users - and it wouldn't surprise me if this app is using the GPS/Maps part of Android to get your movements.
FB's makes their money spying on people and sharing data with marketers,
Keep that in mind. They are a marketer's wet dream.
Aside from the FB employees, who really wants Facebook to track his own phone calls 24x7x365..because have no doubt, they will be tracking everything through this shit
FB phone home!
I sure hope the phones that are oriented around this app are clearly marked as such. I don't want my smartphone experience to be centered around Facebook, especially when I don't even have an account.
I find this really disturbing:
...Home essentially is a custom start screen for your Android phone, replacing the home screen with one centered on Facebook....
So everything you run on the Facebook phone-Home device is a sub-process of Facebook's snooping program. Zucky must be beside himself with all the extra data that will be collected on the Facebook sheeple.
My FB usage has gone down a lot over the last year. I just can't see it going back up. I suppose the concept of "Home" is nice (even though it's just to harvest your data), but, well... I'd never use it.
Well, not exactly what the rumors were. It's not a phone, not an OS but just an app.
Wouldn't that just be cool!! To root your phone just so you can sell your soul to Zuckerberg!! Because, you know, there's just nothing about this whole idea that in any way doesn't pass the sniff test.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
But I bet my sister installs this onto her phone the first hour it's available to her.
#DeleteChrome
I uninstalled the Facebook app when I found its background service responsible for 10% of my battery life. I only ever want to use it to upload a picture or two (upload via https://m.facebook.com/ on Android browsers has been broken for a while).
I'm wondering if they've improved this at all with this Home work. In the mantime, does anybody here know of a way to specifically or generally turn off such a background process? If I kill it, it comes right back.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Android lets you replace the launcher and other component parts and it looks like that is all this Facebook app is doing. Given how intrusive and battery sapping their app is, I think I'll pass.
It's a Facebook app for those who treat Facebook more like crackbook. Who care's? There are thousands of different android phones out there, this one just happens to have one particular app ingrained as a theme. This phone isn't going to hurt anyone and it will benefit those who live their lives through that particular corporations product.
Might I suggest the much more usable and robust CAT themed smartphone instead? At least that phone should survive any drunken friends or small children that happen to get their hands on it.
Rather than having a phone that's designed to spill everything I do to Google, I get a phone designed to spill everything I do to both Google AND Facebook. Geez, loverly.
Test your net with Netalyzr
...I probably already hate you
I was reading about this new Facebook home app and the thought that jumped out at me is that this is Facebook's version of the Windows 8 Metro UI. Is it Android? Or is is some new Facebook OS? As long as you stay in Facebook Home everything is wonderful. But don't worry, you can always escape back to the normal Android home screen and do everything you used to do. What could go wrong with that?
Being "illegal" to root ones device you send everything to third parties
you have no business knowing who, and nothing you can do about it.
You can opt out but that's at the desecration of the third party, only those
living in California USA can write and request where there private info has gone.
ADaway or any other ad blocking application can't be found as it's against Google Play TOS.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/03/13/breaking-google-has-begun-purging-ad-blocking-apps-from-the-play-store/
Android 4.2.X and above a HOSTS file doesn't work anymore, it was disabled to patch a security hole.
- I lost the link for this, If you google ADaway you will run across it as the "hole" is what Adaway used, (ability to use 127.0.0.1 once a WiFi session).
But the sheep know nothing of this, and have or will never read a Privacy Policy.
From the replies to this article it's good to see the "what are they thinking" of attitude
-s
I don't like Zuckerberg, I don't trust him and I don't want anything to do with him.
"On one level, Home is the next mobile version of Facebook. On the other, it allows us to now have direct and full access to your hardware and *everything* contained on it (contacts, SMS's, bookmarks, browser history, etc etc), not to mention every finger swipe & tap."
FTFY. eat shit, fuckerberg
Hardware vendors are missing the boat by forgetting that good hardware can make work for 50X as many software folk as hardware folk. Closed hardware specifications do not help....
Some early versions of Android have no support for multiple cores yet MP hardware was available. Many Samsung phones lack full support of the graphics hardware. Without acceleration they were quick enough so ship it. Had they updated the OS and drivers I would have stayed with Samsung but their lame hobbling of worthy hardware (Samsung + AT&T) to push new hardware invited me to switch to a grey market phone not from Samsung..
Most interesting is with a billion FB users this software will be seen by such a small fraction of customer eyeballs that it is not worth discussing on its own merits. While they have to start someplace it remains to be seen if the software is a pig that flies or just a pig that eats battery and bandwidth.
Phone hardware is ill documented so even rooting a phone gives little opportunity to improve the foundations. It only helps to remove cruft.... The likes of FB and Google need to get after their hardware partners to step it up.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Yes, Google has confirmed that this will be the default launcher for Key Lime Pie.
FB concerns aside I think it is very good that we are starting to see Home Screens as more than just a list of apps. List of apps seems very inefficient.
That is impressive. Very, very impressive.
Not the software - that sounds mediocre at best.
But the business plan is genius. Without having to create their own OS, they can Borg-ify the majority of existing Android phones out there. By creating their own launcher, they can bury Google features completely, if they so chose to - redirecting most ad-related Android traffic away from Google, and over to Facebook. At the same time, the small group of users who use Google+, who have likely been using the Android app as well, will (I'm guessing) find it much, much easier to post directly to Facebook.
I can't stand Facebook - and the above sounds horrifying. But I'd put money on this being their strategy.
I hope you all caught the latest hagiographic articles going around the more gullible news sites - some reporter used the Wayback to look at Zs website circa 1999 and discovered that it included links to people, therefore this was the precursor to Facebook.
http://www.techspot.com/news/52148-zuckerbergs-first-website-contained-an-early-facebook-prototype.html
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
How long until Verizon Wireless decides to pre-install this on all their phones and lock it in. They already force me to keep a bunch of apps on my phone (including Facebook's app but also including ones like NFL Mobile) which I have no interest in using. I can't remove these apps without unlocking my phone which is "illegal" now. It's not like I'd leave them if they let me remove these apps. After all, they have me locked into a contract and are, quite frankly, the best carrier in my area. I might even be able to see keeping on the apps directly related to their Verizon Wireless services. I just want to delete these third party apps that I never use.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Aren't you happy your privacy is penetrated only by goOgle? Now you can get double penetration from failbook as well! Oh the joy!
Sign off your soul today! Very special offer!
.... it had better at least update my peeps any time I'm watching pr0n on the tubes. I require constant automatic updates on my status, so people can track my highly intriguing life-style. [scratches balls]
If Facebook Home is successful at all, this might mark the first time when a popular app is first available for Android, but not for iOS.
YAWN
Perzactly. I couldn't be less interested if I were dead.
Well, that's not quite true.
When I get an Android tablet or phone I will be highly focused on seeing Facebook is not a component anywhere on it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
um....no.
A home phone that phones home? Somehow I have this hunch that I can do without. And not just 'cause I don't have a FB account.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mark Zuckerberg must have inherited Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, since nobody seems to have brought up the fact that Facebook Home is essentially a blatant rip-off of Windows Phone. Put people before apps? Facebook photos on the lock screen? Status updates on the home screen? Integrated Facebook chat? Windows Phone has been doing these for years now.
All those advances you spoke of are incremental and following a logical progression. It's not that revolutionary. I'm talking about a Mr. Fusion reactor to power every home revolutionary.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I spend far too much time uninstalling/deleting/nuking from orbit all the crapware that comes pre-installed on a new computer. Why on FSM's green-ish earth would I BUY a device that uses crapware as the main selling point?
They can't even 'upgrade' their Android app without breaking functionality. That's just the kind of stability I want on my cell phone. ~sarcasm~.
Sounds impressive.
Innovation & technology - way to go FB.
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