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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't make a lot of sense that people aren't downloading Home because of missing Android features - most probably wouldn't know there was something missing until they ran it. The simplest explanation is that people don't download something they aren't interested in, as Gruber points out.

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> The simplest explanation is that people don't download something they aren't interested in

Agree completely. Regardless of whether or not android users would miss their widgets, a big problem is that, just judging from a small local sample of friends and coworkers, no one has any idea just what the point of the app is. Facebook's marketing campaign around this thing is absolutely terrible. From their constant advertising, I've surmised that it's, I don't know, some kind of live updating slideshow of friend's photos? My curiosity is not piqued enough to even bother an install.

The marketing of it is really just terrible, which really puts me off. The strategy of "be even more of a non-current-situation-engaging dickhead in social situations with our app!" I don't see a commercial of someone in an art gallery, ignoring the paintings, ignoring the person their with, and generally just being insufferably over connected and think "y'know, I should get that app."

May just be getting old though..

I think the marketing is particularly bad and devoid of messaging because what else are they going to say?

"Download Facebook Home, its an Android home replacement which includes none of the features of the basic Android launchers that you've been using since the day you got your phone. We'll move all of your stuff behind our wall of Facebook so it becomes more difficult to find."

I'm sure in a lot of cases it comes down to this: "Wait, if I install this I'll lose my weather widget? Forget it."

It's a solution looking for a problem. I see this all the time in big corporations. Facebook probably thought, "We need to make something mobile, so what should that be? How about a home screen? Yeah that sounds OK". Organizations like Facebook don't start with the problem and come up with a solution, but instead think "how could we leverage X?", "what could we do with Y?", "can we exploit this synergy here?". Once they find something that sounds like a plausible thing to build, they keep telling themselves that it's solving a real problem until they themselves believe it.

There are over 1 million people using it so I wouldn't say people aren't interested. I think more people aren't downloading it because of the bad reviews - which are mainly because of the missing features.

> over 1 million people have downloaded it

I don't know how many are actually using it, but I would imagine a lot less (10% of that?)

Of course if you have a big enough brand and enough advertising people will download it, but no amount of advertising will make people continue using a bad product.

Which brings us to:

> I think more people aren't downloading it because of the bad reviews - which are mainly because of the missing features.

Is there a way to get the # of people who uninstalled? That would be as important as the # who installed.

I thought the whole point of Facebook Home was if you download it, you're automatically using it. If you don't want to use it, you have to uninstall it. There's no having it installed and not using it.

Agree with you

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