New app from Facebook flops

There haven’t been many Facebook Home users. But the ones out there don’t seem to like how much control the app has over their phones.  

By: Ani Hajderaj, staff writer 

Facebook has been a massive hit on personal computers. However, with the rising popularity of smartphones and tablets in recent years, social media has made its way onto devices across many platforms: Android, iOS and Blackberry OS.

Having something as powerful as Facebook on smartphones has allowed people to  share their lives effortlessly over the web. Because of such ease, everybody is posting, sharing and even “stalking” (as some might call it) at unprecedented frequency.

Social media has even crossed from the personal into the business realm, with companies using the technology to connect with their customers.

The latest product from CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s company is called Facebook Home. The Android app takes over your phone’s operating system, giving you instant access to your news feed, messages and friend activity – all on your home screen.

For now, the new feature is only available on select devices: HTC One, One X, One X+, Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Note 2. Fewer than a million users have downloaded the application from the Google Play store.

The Asian mobile phone manufacturer, HTC, has Facebook Home preloaded on its new device, the HTC First. CNET reports that the phone comes optimized to run the app.

So far, few are liking the new app. With more than 15,000 reviews on the Google Play store, Facebook Home only has a rating of 2.2 stars out of five.

Perhaps not everyone wants the app to take over their phone. However, its settings allow you to limit how much you want to be displayed on your home screen.

Although I don’t like the idea of Facebook taking over my mobile phone experience, that could change as it improves over time.

In the mean time, I’ll just enjoy the new chat feature. On devices that don’t support Facebook Home, the newest Facebook Messenger update uses one of the new app’s features, where active conversations appear on top of open applications.

This works well on my LG Nexus 4 and it gives you the option to close all chat windows so it never really gets in the way. It even integrates with SMS so I don’t have to keep opening and closing applications.