Facebook Unveils Home, A New 'Family Of Apps' For Android Phones



Facebook is introducing a “family of apps” called Home, that act as a integrated homescreen for Android phones.
“We want to bring this experience of having a home, and always knowing what’s going on around you, right to your phone,” founder and CEO Mark Zuckerbergannounced at a packed press event at the company’s headquarters. “It’s a family of apps – you can install it and it becomes the home of your phone. We’re calling it ‘Home.’”


Zuckerberg said that Facebook was not building a phone, and that doing so would have only tapped into a small portion of its 1 billion-strong user base. He added that Facebook did not need to create an operating system to do this or “fork” Android, echoing what Amazon did with the Kindle.
Home essentially acts a homescreen for the phone, so that when an Android phone is started it shows a cover photo chosen by the user.
“What if phones were designed around people, and not apps?” Zuckerberg asked during his presentation.
He then introduced a feature called Chat Heads, where circular headshots of a user’s friends or contacts pop up on the screen to notify them of a message. Zuckerberg referred to this as a “new form of messaging.”
Users could drag the small photo of their contacts around the screen with their finger, and the photo would pop up on the screen in applications or while browsing.
Another Facebook executive said Home would also be made available for tablets a few months after the launch for smartphones.
Home will be available to download on April 12 from Google Play, on a handful of HTC and Samsung devices. Forbes