Facebook is listening to Android users and bringing Instagram and other third party social media to its Home app, which hasn’t been as popular as CEO Mark Zuckerberg had hoped so far.
Talking at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, Zuckerberg said the company is working on a new version of the Android launcher, which essentially turns your device into a Facebook phone. The new version is integrating more social media thanks to user requests, he claimed.
While the Chat Heads feature Home introduced has been popular, and was rolled out to the iOS Facebook app, Home has failed to set Android users alight. According to the Google Play page, there have been between one and five million installs since launch. That number doesn’t tell us how many active Home users there are, and for comparison, the official Facebook Android app has between 500 million and a billion installs, so Home has a long way to go, even when you take into account the limited devices that are compatible with it.
One way Facebook plans to get more installs is to prompt users to install Home while they are using Facebook on their devices. Many websites with apps do this now, asking if you’d like to install their app instead of viewing the page in your browser. However, such a move could be alienating for users, so Facebook will have to tread carefully.
- Facebook Home updated with support for folders
- Facebook Home gets an app tray
- Facebook Home near 1 million downloads
- Hands on with Facebook Home
[Source: TechCrunch]
