Facebook Home: A Job Well Done

Facebook has recently released Facebook Home for select Android devices, and it represents a smart move by the social media giant. For months, if not years, the tech community has speculated whether Facebook would release their own Facebook built and branded phone. Poorly executed devices like the HTC ChaCha indicated that the market was not necessarily interested in a Facebook phone per se, yet the fact that 40% of Facebook use comes from mobile phones meant that the company could not simply ignore it. In order to capitalize on a growing market that incessantly uses Facebook on high end smart phones, Facebook created Home.

Facebook Home is an application that presently runs on selected Android devices, including the announced HTC First, and is effectively an Android skin. If you haven’t seen it in action yet, click here to see how it replaces your phone’s existing operating system with a Facebook focused one. For Facebook, Home is an ingenious move as it gains the company access into a market that has extremely high barriers to entry with relative ease and low costs. By creating a software solution rather than a hardware one, Facebook are able to enter the mobile market without having to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. Furthermore, with Home being an App that can be downloaded, it allows Facebook to get their unique user interface into infinitely more devices than if it were to introduce its own device to the market.

What Facebook have demonstrated with Facebook Home is that they understand mobile. They understand their demographic, they understand what they want and they understand how they use their devices. With Home, Facebook have promised monthly updates which means that the company can swiftly and effectively bring to market the most up to date experience with great ease, which marks a shift away from the annual cycle of updates that we are used seeing to from tech’s big payers. Facebook Home is an innovative, easy to use and highly effective skin to Android that will cement the company’s presence on mobile devices for the foreseeable future.

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