Facebook Home, the newest feature by social media giant Facebook, has been downloaded at least 500,000 times since it was made available April 12 on Google Play.
While the numbers seem small, the feature is fairly new to the market and is available only on certain devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, HTC One X and HTC One X+. The HTC First comes with the application already installed.
The app has garnered over 100,000 downloads a day on average. But those numbers aren't that impressive. When the popular photo app Instagram first came out on Android, it hit 1 million downloads within 24 hours.
Facebook Home was initially introduced as an essential app for the smartphone. Many speculated at the time that the company was launching a phone of its own manufacture, the Facebook Phone. However, the app is basically an interactive Facebook feed where users can access content from their profiles, start online conversations easily and organize their groups.
Unfortunately, the new function didn't generate much buzz on the review boards. Many users gave the app just one or two stars. Facebook Home now has an average rating of 2.2 stars from 11,300 reviewers.
"It was cool at first but needs some tweeking [sic] to be more user friendly. I installed it last night and uninstalled it this morning," a user named Matt Higgins wrote on the review board.
"I don't want to say Facebook Home is bad, but it probably won't save the world...," another user, Balazs Lehotai, added to the reviews.
One concern might be the way it organizes information. Salorix, an analytics firm, found many users were largely neutral or negative about the new Facebook feature mostly due to concerns over privacy issues.
Since Facebook has more than a billion users, reaching 500,000 may not have a real impact in pushing the Facebook Home product much further.
