Facebook Home sees 500K Google Play downloads in five days

But Facebook Home has racked up a dismal user review average on Google Play. 

|
Facebook
Facebook Home has been downloaded from the Google Play store 500,000 times.

Earlier this month, Facebook took the wraps off Home, a suite of Android apps that converts your phone into a Facebook-centric device. Generally speaking, critics liked the software – "if you are a big Facebook fan, Facebook Home can be a big win," wrote one reviewer – and the HTC First, the first smart phone to come prepackaged with Home. So how is Home doing? 

Moderately well, but maybe not as well as Facebook had hoped. According to Facebook's Benedict Evans, Facebook Home has been downloaded 500,000 times from the Google Play store since its debut on April 16. Mr. Evans posted the announcement to Twitter on Sunday, meaning that downloads averaged about 100,000 a day. Still, as Jordan Crook notes over at TechCrunch today, "these aren't blow-out numbers." 

Mr. Crook name-checks Instagram, which "launched on Android and hit over 1 million downloads in a day [and] 5 million downloads in six days... Those were blow-out numbers," Crook adds. "You also have to consider that Facebook has over a billion users, so 500K doesn’t really move the needle." 

In addition, it may be worth calling attention to the dismal write-ups of Home posted to the Google Play store. Home is averaging two out of five stars in the user review category, with a whopping 6,129 one-star reviews, as of this writing.

"This app adds nothing that I can't get from the regular Facebook app AND it takes away everything I already love about my Android phone and the care I've taken to set it up," one user complained. "Uninstalled."

Of course, Facebook Home is in the early stages of what will eventually be a much larger-scale roll-out. Home is currently available only for a relatively small range of devices, including the HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II. Over at Mashable, Christina Warren learned this the hard way when she attempted to install Home on her Nexus 4 – a pretty advanced phone – and received a simple message: "Your device is not supported yet." 

Bummer. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Facebook Home sees 500K Google Play downloads in five days
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0422/Facebook-Home-sees-500K-Google-Play-downloads-in-five-days
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe