Facebook Home hasn’t exactly been well received by the general public. As of this writing over half of the 14,000+ ratings on the play store are a dismal 1 star. Many of the reviews simply hate on it, but most at least acknowledge that it is a good start with potential and it appears that Mathias Duarte agrees.According to Duarte Facebook home “shows an incredible amount of polish and attention to design detail.”
That complement means a lot coming from the director of Android User Experience and from a UI standpoint Facebook Home is honestly fantastic. I gave it a try on my Nexus 4 by using the unlocked version of the app. The experience was smooth and I could tell that someone who was a little more into Facebook could actually enjoy the experience. Even though the launcher wasn’t specifically designed for my device performance was acceptable for the duration of my test. Elements like chatheads and the actively changing wallpapers didn’t stutter, those looking for an excellent simple launcher would probably enjoy this. However the utter lack of widgets and much of the personalization Android fans adore encouraged me to give it up.
Knowing Duarte enjoyed it as well makes me hope a few of the features from home might be introduced in the next version of android, which by the way looks to be called 4.3 jellybean. I would love to be able to select a few pictures from my gallery to form a slideshow wallpaper. Chatheads seems to be the one feature all users of Home seem to love, if babel could integrate pop up chats similar to Facebook’s feature I and many others would be extremely happy.
One of androids largest advantages over iOS is the massive extent non-Google devs can customize the operating system. I’m always happy to see the team Google paying close attention to all of these launchers, ROMs even some of the more heinous OEM skins. Facebook Home is one of the most innovative launchers ever and I’m happy the head of Android design would actually bother to look it over. Do you think Facebook Home is good for android? Does it maybe deserve slightly less harsh ratings? Let us know in the comments below!