Earlier in April, Facebook unveiled its new Android platform Facebook Home in an effort to make itself an even more integral part of the mobile experience. In the weeks since, Facebook Home has been downloaded more than 500,000 times - a relatively small figure given Facebook's billion or so users.
Granted, Facebook Home is not yet available on all Android devices, and it isn't available at all on iPhone (and likely never will be), but among the users who've already downloaded the platform, Facebook Home has only managed to garner 2.2-star reviews out of 5 stars.
According to Fortune, it's likely that a large cross section of those who've downloaded Facebook Home did so out of sheer curiosity. Wired initially called the "apperating system" a "triumph in mediocrity," but a more comprehensive review now paints an even grimmer picture.
Facebook Home apparently kills battery life and according to Wired, the only way to fix that is to reduce image quality settings to Low, which seems to kill the purpose of Facebook Home to a large extent.
Additionally, Wired reports that Facebook Home users have complained about the difficulty of placing calls once the platform is installed.
In an interview with Fortune, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes a pretty rosy future for Facebook Home on Android, and is careful to frame Apple's disinterest in Facebook Home in terms of OS openness:
"I think that Google has this opportunity in the next year or two to start doing the things that are way better than what can be done on iPhone through the openness of their platform," Zuckerberg said. "We'd love to offer this on iPhone, and we just can't today, and we will work with Apple to do the best experience that we can within what they want, but I think that a lot of people who really like Facebook -- and just judging from the numbers, people are spending a fifth of their time in phones on Facebook, that's a lot of people. This could really tip things in that direction. We'll have to see how it plays out."
Whether or not the open/closed OS argument is salient in this case, the merit of Facebook Home needs to be established first. At the moment, it's hard to say if there is any.
