So the HTC First went on sale Friday, ninety-nine bucks with a two-year AT&T contract, and instead of buying a whole new phone just to try Facebook's launcher I did the sensible thing and sideloaded Home onto my Galaxy S3 like everyone else who didnt want to commit. Google Play had it up for a handful of supported phones the same day and it took maybe four minutes to install. I've had it running since Friday night and I have Opinions.
Chat Heads are the good part, and I'm a little annoyed at how good they are. You get a message and this little round bubble with the person's profile photo just floats onto your screen, wherever you are, whatever app you're in. Tap it and the conversation pops open right there. Drag it to the corner and it shrinks and waits. It sounds gimmicky when you describe it and then you actually use it for two days and every other Android messaging setup feels broken by comparison. I was in the middle of typing an email when my friend Dan sent me a picture of his cat wearing a tiny sombrero and I didnt have to leave what I was doing to see it. Thats a small thing but its the kind of small thing that actually changes how you use a phone.
Cover Feed, though. Cover Feed is the part where Facebook takes over your entire home screen and lock screen and turns them into a slideshow of your newsfeed, and I get why they did it, they want you living inside Facebook instead of visiting it, but I dont want that. I want my home screen to be my home screen. I had eleven icons arranged exactly how I like them (Camera bottom left, always, non-negotiable) and Home just steamrolled the whole layout the second I turned it on. You can still get to your app drawer but its buried behind an extra tap now, and every time I unlock my phone I get a full-bleed photo of somebody's brunch instead of the time. My aunt posted about her garden and now I know more about her tomato plants than I ever asked to.
The bigger issue, and I think this is the one that matters more than which parts I personally like, is that Home is a launcher that isnt really trying to be a good launcher. Its trying to be a Facebook delivery mechanism thats shaped like a launcher. Every design decision pushes you toward the newsfeed. The battery drain is real too, my phone was down to 40% by early afternoon on Saturday doing basically nothing different than usual, and I'd bet money thats Cover Feed constantly pulling fresh photos in the background.
I keep going back and forth on whether I'll keep it installed. Right now Chat Heads alone is almost enough to make me put up with the rest of it, which says something uncomfortable about how good Facebook is at making the parts you actually want slightly addictive. Ask me again in two weeks and I might have uninstalled the whole thing and gone back to a boring app drawer with Camera in the bottom left where it belongs.
Small unrelated thing while I'm complaining about apps taking over my phone: I also grabbed Google Keep last week when it showed up in Drive, just a little note-taking thing with colored cards, and I like it way more than I expected to for something that basically just does sticky notes. No idea if itll still exist in a year (Google has a habit, we all know the habit) but for now its where my grocery lists live instead of the sad little default notes app nobody designs for. Anyway. If you've got a supported phone and havent tried Home yet, its worth the four minutes just to feel Chat Heads for yourself, even if you end up ripping the rest of it back off like I might.