Facebook Home Hits Half-Million Downloads
— -- Is Facebook Home a hit? The reception for this Android software has been decidedly mixed, but there is at least one statistic the social network can tout: As of this weekend, Home has been downloaded more than 500,000 times.
That's not a bad showing for an app that launched just over a week ago, on April 12, in the Google Play store. It also doesn't count sales of the HTC First, the first phone to come with Facebook Home pre-loaded.
It isn't the best showing possible — for comparison, 500,000 new Android devices are registered every 12 hours. Home is only supported on four Android devices so far; then again, many of those half-million downloads may come from users who didn't realize they couldn't install it on their Android device.
Facebook has more than a billion active users, and Android has roughly half a billion active accounts. In other words, these downloads represent just 0.001% of the potential user base.
More troubling for Facebook is the user feedback in the Play Store. The app has an average rating of 2.2 stars out of 5. Some 11,480 people have left a review; the majority, 5,960, have rated it one star.
Many users mentioned that the app, which sits atop the Android software itself and shows posts from your friends in your lock screen and home screen, was a drain on their battery. Other reviews complained that it hid other Android apps too deeply within its system and offered no support for widgets.
Google Play does not count the number of users who uninstall an app. Facebook, hesitant to introduce such a big change to Android users without giving them an easy way to walk it back, allows you to use Home in a special trial mode before you fully install it.
Have you installed Facebook Home? Share your experience in the comments.
