Steer clear of Facebook’s Home for Android | Hacker News Reader

Steer clear of Facebook’s Home for Android

seattletimes.com

62 pointsgtani33 comments

All this criticism of Facebook home is kind of ridiculous. It's basically preaching to the choir. What I hear when I've read almost all of the recent criticisms is "Don't use Facebook Home if you don't like the whole point of Facebook Home". Well, duh!

Facebook Home is for people who live on Facebook. It doesn't pretend to be anything different. If you're a Facebook fiend you'll love this. If you read HN you'll love to hate it. This software is not bad. It just doesn't suit the purposes of people who, well, have a different use-case in mind for their phone than the people who would like Home do.

I'd like to see more reviews that are aimed at those who would actually want to use this software. At this point all we get is "hey, people who would never like this thing, you shouldn't use it and hey let's have fun hating on it". I wouldn't use it. I agree with the article completely but my problem is that the point of the article is irrelevant. Instead there should be balanced reviews that weigh the pros and cons of this software for the audience it's aimed at.

This is like going to GNU conference and reviewing Windows as an OS you wouldn't like and shouldn't use.

Not sure if you read the article, but it did spend a good while focusing on why people who like Facebook may not like it: in particular it is missing a good number of features we're used to in Facebook. For example, I can watch videos in the Facebook app, but not Facebook home (a little strange). Similarly, you can't share webpages, etc. His whole thesis was that it took over too much of the phone while simultaneously not providing enough Facebook features. Seems like a fair criticism to me.

His main thesis focuses far more on why people who don't live in Facebook wouldn't like this ("it took over too much of the phone") than why people who like Facebook will like it. The mention of features Facebook fans would love was really more of an afterthought than the point. It was like saying "all this stuff sucks but I guess it'd be cool if you love Facebook". Articles like this always seem to be written by someone who doesn't understand the audience of the product.

"So while Home offers more of Facebook than you’re likely to want, it gives you fewer ways of interacting with the social network than you probably would like." (emphasis mine)

Written like exactly the kind of person I'm describing. I think if it were fair criticism then it would focus more on how engrossing and mesmerizing the author says it is and of course then mention some of its lacking features. If you take out all the love-to-hate-it parts it'd end up being a fairly positive review of the product.

And please don't do that, the "not sure if you read the article" thing. I didn't come away with the same message as you but I read it.

That's wrong, you totally can share web pages to Facebook from Chrome. Just press the "Share..." option and select Facebook.

You can update and improve software after the initial launch. Who knew!

In other words, you'd like people to review how well the software fulfills its intended purpose. Which tends to be a pretty good way to judge software -- judge the purpose separately, or let people judge it for themselves, as they will anyway.

Makes sense. Zynga makes so much money from their "whales", the people who spend way more than the general users, that they even design for them to a degree. It could make sense for Facebook to design a product for their power users.

Zynga makes its money off "whales" because it's a freemium model, where heavy users pay for extra functionality. Facebook has an advertising model, where they basically get paid for "unique users". So once a user views more than a few pages of ads a day, the marginal value probably starts to decline for them.

Ultimately, he's writing the story for the Seattle Times readers, not hard-core Facebook users.

Hi folks. I'm one of the engineers on Facebook Home (disclaimer these are my opinions and not those of Facebook). It's been really interesting reading the early reviews. I think we can learn a lot from them.

The goal of the product is to make your phone feel more alive with content from the people you care about while still allowing you to efficiently perform all the typical tasks you use your phone for. The navigation model is a bit different than what people have become accustomed to, so some confusion is very understandable; however, we tried very hard to make access to any task just as efficient on Home as any other launcher. Getting to any app is just one gesture away: swipe up to launcher; swipe right to the last app; or double tap the home button to bring up the switcher. As user feedback comes in we'll continue to tune our model to try and achieve a nice balance between surfacing social content and completing tasks.

Home was designed and engineered by a pretty small team with a goal of releasing a high quality, performant, and beautiful product. To ensure our bar was met, we tried to narrowly focus on doing just a few things but doing them well for the first release. Of course the trade off here is that some features that people value are missing. I hope this first version will be judged on the execution of what we did include as we continue to fill in the gaps in future releases.

For anyone who has checked it out so far Thank you! I'm looking forward to making the experience something you'll love.

I'm sure you've already received similar feedback; but still: pressing the home button for me is something that should never result in a spinner showing up for a few seconds. The first time I saw this I had to restrain myself from immediately deinstalling Facebook home (and that's coming from someone who decided to try out the app for at least a few days).

Furthermore I'm missing a way to show the currently showing post in the Facebook app (I want that because home is missing some features).

Finally: I was somewhat frustrated to learn upon release of Facebook home that you guys decided to start out us-only. Understandable of course, but please don't make the rest of the world wait in vain for the arrival of a date (the 12th) that doesn't actually allow you to try out the app (I sideloaded an apk instead).

On a more positive note: ballsy move, and nice execution!

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that hitting a loading spinner on the home screen should never happen. Sounds like you might have encountered a cold start. Occasionally the Android OS will kill our process to relieve memory pressure. This tends to happen when you are using an app that consumes a lot of memory in the foreground and then return to Home. Improving our cold start time and adding additional protections to our process to make it less likely to be killed are things we're working on. We're also continuing to tune our ranking algorithms for showing you the freshest most interesting content when you turn the screen on. The fullscreen experience of Cover Feed presents some unique and interesting technical problems to solve, but our goal is that the most relevant and fresh content is always given the highest priority. We'll continue to tune this over time and fill in missing features. We'll be making some blog posts about the engineering of Home soon that will go into more detail on some of these areas. Thanks for your patience on the wider rollout. I'm really excited to get this in the hands of more users.

I think overall the design and implementation is quite impressive. However, the feeling I got when I installed it last night was that it limits my phone's experience (ie., no widgets, etc). So while I can see Facebook Home appeal to hard-core FB users (ie., especially younger ones), I don't think it will appeal to everyone. But that's not necessarily a bad thing if the target is the hard-core FB user. I'm sure over time FB Home will get better and likely appeal to more people and it extends its capabilities.

Right on. Thanks for checking it out! I'm looking forward to getting more of the features that power users look for in the launcher so we can widen our potential audience.

Are widgets considered a power user thing? My mom/dad/wife all use widgets and I'd say they are far from power users.

The number one thing I noticed right away when I used Home for the first time is that it does not allow for direct swiping to camera.

This is the NUMBER ONE thing I use on my iPhone - as I need to get to camera ASAP in instances.

With the fact that FB owns instagram and the experience that home provides is a rich visual one - I hope this is one of the first updates you make.

(I know that the canned response may be: "well its easy to get to the camera by..." -- Sure, it may be easy - but its WAY TOO SLOW - get out of the way of the camera.)

I really love the look and feel of Facebook Home, great work on the overall design! I do think it's a bit awkward in how it handles my applications and the lack of widgets is a huge downer, but I'm sure you guys will figure that out.

That said, is there any chance the Facebook for Android app will be updated to be more like Facebook Home? It's incredible how much _better_ Home looks and feels on my phone. It's incredibly jarring when an action in Home opens the regular Facebook app.

So it was basically a piece of concept art meant to stroke the egos of the executives, right? and never should have been released to the public?

How does it affect user's privacy? Play page says - THIS APPLICATION REQUIRES NO SPECIAL PERMISSIONS TO RUN.

That I don't understand this coming from Facebook, if this means Facebook isn't reading anything.

Though the app is not available in my country, a friend from US said it's plain clunky and he uninstalled it within minutes. My concern would be privacy, mostly because it's Facebook.

O_o I don't know why the play page might be showing you that.

The app requires basically every single permission possible.

No, this app does not. This app does communicate with the actual Facebook app which _does_ require quite a few permissions.

>>actual Facebook app which _does_ require quite a few permissions.

Well, that explains it. I am familiar with those few permissions :-)

Steering clear of Facebook entirely would be better advice, I think.

It's tremendously useful as a global addressbook / Rolodex for someone who's lived in various parts of the world.

The problem of course is that this address book has evil tentacles coming out of it, grabbing at my wallet and other items as I walk down the street.

That is an interesting point. I suppose if you were using it that way, you could simply just log in only via Private Browsing or via a dedicated web browser.

Try Fluid. It's essentially a webkit-app-creator for OS X, and it can sandbox cookies and the session. It also allows facebook to be fired up from spotlight.

Your comment adds nothing to the discussion. You could replace Facebook with any company. Apple / Google / Microsoft / Twitter, etc...

Your comment is nothing more than trolling. Please refrain from trolling. Thank you.

I disagree. Facebook is a particularly bad company and people should not be giving their data to them. I also think it is unwise to give lots of data to Google as well.

Nice tinfoil.

I don't think I could be any less inclined to try that app/launcher anyway.

Facebook Home could've been nice if there was at least some sign of security. Everybody getting hold of your phone can post all kinds of nasty stuff on your behalf to the world. That's a huge oversight, which made me deactivate Home. It's not so bad otherwise, but having no PIN or password or anything similar is just a no no go for every sane individual.

I love it.

"Steer clear of Facebook’s Home for Android"

I steer clear of Facebook, other than logging in on a separate browser for 10 minutes a day. However, most people are not like me and they are unlikely to care about the "steer clear" advice. They live on Facebook, jut as most people live online /browser (but use a Windows computer to get there)

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