Facebook recently announced its Home for Android, a launcher-style application available for download for a limited number of devices on April 12. Brushing aside all speculations of the social networking site releasing its own smartphone, the company seems to have set its goal at converting all Android devices into Facebook phones. The move, as industry experts claim, will only act as another sign of Android’s fragmentation issues.
Android has seen many updates and versions since its first release. Starting from 2.0 (Eclair) to 2.2 (Froyo) and now to 4.x (Jelly Bean), the OS has had many patch iterations, dot versions and different devices running on different versions. The platform has hundred thousands of apps to its credit and frequent updates only make matters difficult for developers who end up updating their apps frequently to run on newer versions. If the OS is going to fragment further, developers may not take it too well. There already exist multiple versions of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Dalvik 2.3.3 port running on the BlackBerry 10 OS to complicate the situation.
However, Facebook Home cannot be compared precisely to Dalvik; rather, it is similar to the skins certain companies put on top of the OS. For example, Motorola’s Motoblur UI on its early Android smartphones and what Samsung has done with its customized TouchWiz Nature UX on the Galaxy series. So, Facebook Home will remain one of many third party overlays or launchers which can be downloaded from the Google Play store that end-users can use to customize their device to give it a completely different feel from Android.
Facebook is harmless for now, but will turn a major threat to Google when it begins monetizing the platform by including advertisements or processing payments for in-app purchases outside Google Play or by introducing its own app store. When that happens, Facebook may get chucked out of the Play store due to Google’s developer program policy. If this were to happen, Facebook could easily allow users to sideload the launcher on their devices; a practice Amazon has already popularized. However, this is far from reality yet, and how Facebook Home actually evolves will influence all the above possible outcomes.
The issue will turn more serious when Google’s OEM partners like Samsung come into the picture. The South Korean electronics giant, who has its own value-added apps to replace core functionality in Android, will not want Facebook to override the default user experience. Many other companies will inevitably be pulled into this Android fragmentation process. Sadly, the future of Android developer ecosystem is gradually moving away from the hands of Google to other industry giants.
