Facebook is a fact of life for most of my friends in the tech industry. I've seen firsthand the impact that not having a Facebook profile can cause to hiring decisions, networking, and even whether or not friends will include you in their social engagements. These days, not having a Facebook profile has real negative financial and social consequences. Many years ago, when I signed up to reconnect with my college buddies, I'm not sure this is what I was signing up for.
So the very idea of installing a more pervasive version of Facebook on my Android device does not appeal to me.
But to be more specific:
- I don't trust Facebook to provide an efficient or well-coded Android experience. I have never seen them do so with the standard app, and am genuinely appalled at the idea of handing over my primary device interaction to developers who seemingly don't value UX. Why would I give them my primary user experience, when they have never handled a secondary one particularly well?
- This whole battle about who controls access to my information is becoming a little unnerving to me. Each month, it seems like the curtain is pulled back a little further.
- Once and for all, Facebook is not about connecting us with friends. It's about watching our connections and selling the data that they generate. Facebook tries to warm-and-fuzzy this up, but it's not warm, or fuzzy. It's a business model that I wish didn't exist, and no amount of feel-good footage of happy frolicking hipsters with sun glinting into the camera lens is going to change that.
- I'd like companies to stop trying to hijack Android, but it's not going to happen, and I guess I have Google to blame for that. Android should have been closed. This whole 'open' thing is not working for them, because it only results in cheap, nasty devices and bad user experiences that tarnish the reputation of the platform. If every Android device were a Nexus, or the quality of a Nexus, this image problem we have now would not exist, sales numbers be damned.
So, in a word, "no." I will not be installing Facebook Home. I will be uninstalling the Facebook app if it nags me to install Home very often.
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