FB Home shows an incredible amount of polish, says Android Design Chief

Facebook Home has so far received a reaction from users that can best be described as lukewarm, but some of the higher ups at Google really seem to like it. Android Design Chief Matias Durate told ABC News that Facebook Home “shows an incredible amount of polish and attention to design detail.” He said that this is impressive because it “didn’t come from a hardware manufacturer.”

He continued, “with the Home experience, they did a nice job expressing the Facebook experience, but so much of the Google design experience with Ice Cream Sandwich [Android 4.0> was in there as well.”

Facebook Home is apparently what open source is all about

Durate echoes the sentiments of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt who has previously called Facebook Home “fantastic”. He said that this follows the Android philosophy of being customisable to the user’s content. According to Schmidt, being able to use things like Facebook Home is “what open source is all about.”

Towards the end of April, Facebook Home had been downloaded more than 500,000 times from Google Play. While 500,000 downloads might seem too few in comparison to Facebook’s massive 1 billion-plus user base, the app’s progress is also limited by the number of devices it can run on. Hardware requirements rule out most mid-range handsets, leaving only the high-end ones capable of using Home. By comparison, the main Facebook Android app has been downloaded between 100 million and 500 million times.

A look at the graph presented on the Play Store also makes for an interesting read, which says the number of new downloads for Home has actually dropped since its international launch on April 16. Home is currently available on certain devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC One X and HTC One X+. Besides these phones, Home also runs on the HTC First, which was launched alongside the app on April 4.