Facebook Home app and tie-in HTC First phone announced

Facebook's app will take over many everyday aspects of Android UI

Facebook has finally shed some light on the mysterious ‘Facebook Phone', which turns out to be an Android app that extensively reskins the Android UI, as well as a new phone vehicle from HTC called the First.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Home today by stating that "we all spend 20 percent of our time on phones using Facebook" and that "we all spend more than three times [as long] with Facebook than any other app out there."

To this end, explained Zuckerberg, Facebook wanted to try and design phones "around people, not apps".

"We're not building a phone and we're not building an operating system," said Zuckerberg.

"What we're building is something that goes much deeper than just an ordinary app," he continuyed.

Facebook Home will effectively integrate many of the social network site's stock features into a phone's typical user experience, tiny widgets adorned with friends' faces even able to run on top of apps to allow social contact to continue at the same time as any other process.

"We've all had an experience where you're in the middle of watching a video or writing something, and someone sends you a message," argued Joey Flynn, Facebook director product.

"And then you have to make that decision to stop what you're doing, or ignore your friend."

Flynn maintained that users "should be able to talk to your friends no matter where you are on the phone".

Facebook Home is a simple enough message from Facebook, which Zuckerberg underpinned by reminding the technology community that the standard UI as we know it - across devices - dates back to "Windows 1.0 in the early eighties".

"Computers used to be expensive and clunky and not very fun to use devices," said Zuckerberg, before confirming that Facebook plans to change all this by making social functions available at absolutely any point throughout the the experience.

Facebook's argument seems to have convinced phone manufacturers, confirming that the app, which will launch on 12 April 2013, will work with most major HTC and Samsung devices.

HTC CEO Peter Chou then took the stage to announce the HTC First, a phone that will retail in the US, also from 12 April 2013, for a competitive $99.99 (£65.60).

Chou explained how HTC prides itself on being "first to market with many new technologies, and how the company is "proud of giving these new experiences to people," but skilfully neglected to mention HTC's Facebook-branded ChaCha and Salsa, which were released in 2011 and failed to make a dent with consumers.

Overall, it could be said Facebook is playing a wise game with Facebook Home. It clearly knows a phone entirely built around Facebook would not attract enough attention, so it hopes to persuade people of the worth of placing Facebook at the heart of an Android experience by good, old-fashioned stealth.

After all, this way, if a user doesn't like the Facebook takeover of their Android device, they can simply uninstall it. Meanwhile, if enough people take to the system, Facebook will have solved its longterm puzzle of how to monetise its traditional social network format in the dawn of a mobile age.