Facebook Home for Android: Disruption or delight?

Imagine you are on the verge of drifting off to a much-needed slumber after the throes of a long day, and as your conscious world falls away, your overworked yet loyal brain reminds you of the much-needed wake-up call—possibly your singular hope to get to that important commitment the next morning.

Burning your last drops of energy you reach out and fire up your Android smartphone. Lo and behold…you are met with a virtual procession of images and pictures and other frivolous feed bytes from your friends, which cover the whole screen. Irked at the three extra taps required to navigate to that lifesaver alarm app, you manage to set the alarm and drag yourself back to bed only to find that sleep is now elusive.  

You may call me an extremist for painting such a dismal scenario, but even given the current volume of engagement with smartphones, it's not rare in my life for smartphone interaction to disrupt my drift toward sleep. So if I am horrified at the prospect of having a pile of apps from Facebook that effectively draws a veil over the current android experience, I believe my horror is justified.

I am talking, of course, about Facebook Home for Android. Just over a week ago, Facebook launched its new home screen takeover app in the US with much fanfare. It is slated to be available tomorrow via the PlayStore. And the story doesn’t end there. There is already a smartphone with Facebook Home pre-installed: The HTC First, which goes on sale the same day. We can also safely expect that a few of the top guns in the Android smartphone league will decide to pre-instal the app which, is compatible only with Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich) and above.

To elaborate a bit on Home, the user is greeted with a Cover feed, as I mentioned earlier that will have an ongoing slideshow of pictures from the user's network feeds. And this Cover feed will take over the lock screen and home screen in toto. That means as a user, you are bereft of options to choose what you want to include on the lock screen or the home screen, because it has become Facebook home turf.

How can one access the world that is behind the so-called ‘social home’? That is executed via an ‘app launcher’, which will be like a custom drawer with a bunch of favourites. Suffice to say that the Home is indeed a ‘cover’ feed that covers your entire smartphone experience.  

And then there is this feature called ‘Chat heads’ (a silly name at that) for Facebook message functionality. Whenever there are Facebook messages from your network buddies, those individuals' faces will pop up on the screen—no matter what you're doing—as ‘Chat heads’, which you can then tap to respond or remove.

In other words, the Chat head effectively takes the shape of an intruder that barges in on whatever you are involved in. Amusingly enough, many enthusiastic writers and users see this as cool multi-tasking functionality, whereby one does not need to leave the current activity to engage with such intruders.

Think experience

In an earlier article, I described the ultra-stickiness of present day smartphones (or phablets as they are coming to be called increasingly) thanks to app experiences that power, facilitate and drive many actions in our daily lives. Imagine that sunny morning when you wake up to find that the ready access to umpteen things that lightened up your mobile experience is severely curtailed due to this ‘veil’ that gets drawn over the home screen?

Consider information collection and sharing, an innate part of our daily lives, in which the smartphone holds a pivotal position, And consider the ‘collection’ part being satiated by search (at this juncture, I again point to my previous column, which discusses how smartphones are set to change the largest business on the web, search). With Facebook Home active, easy access to the Google Now search bar disappears, although the better-informed have the option of a single press on the main menu button of phones such as the Galaxy S3 to launch the Google Now screen.

Back to the search experience, although Facebook claims that there has been no intention to disrupt the Google search experience, it doesn’t cut much ice with me. Would I be delighted at the prospect of ‘searching for the search bar’? As an avid user of multiple sharing platforms and a firm believer in the location and context of data versus platform, Facebook Home will at best prove to be an irksome disruption of the hitherto quick and relevant collect-and-share experience.

Now let me focus upon what I call the on-the-run experience. The apps that power our lives—for weather, maps, booking movies and calling taxis, as well as massively popular social chat apps such as Whatsapp and Line—play a ubiquitous and crucial role in our lives simply because they are where they are: at the right place, at the right time. Think of exerting oneself to ‘unveil’ and navigate to these daily app buddies, especially when you are on the run.

Lastly, Facebook Home is not fully meshed in with the main Facebook app, which means that except a few of the functions mentioned above, one still needs to launch the Facebook app to immerse oneself in social networking.

Think disruption

Putting people first before apps was apparently the bright thought that gave birth to Facebook Home, but how many of us are truly comfortable defining our entire smartphone experience on social networking? I agree that social networking is a significant part of the smartphone experience (albeit it only accounts for about a quarter or iPhone and Android app usage, according to a Q4 global study). But isn’t defining the entire smartphone experience on social feeds possibly a foolhardy attempt to create stickiness? Is this really a great way to consume the social feeds?

Methinks it might be a hit with younger audiences, an immersive disruption. But for the rest, this would at best be termed disruptive immersion. That is, if Google doesn’t decide to ban Facebook Home from the Android world in the near future.

If you're interested, here's what Facebook has to say about Home.