Facebook brought a recently rumored Android overlay to life today, Facebook Home, along with the first handset to carry it, the appropriately named HTC First.
Rather than making its own handset, or forking Android to create the Facebook operating system outright, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that as a Google Play download, Home can reach the maximum number of users.
"Our community has more than 1 billion people in it," he said. "A really good phone would only get to one or 2 percent of that."
That's nice rhetoric, but the elephant in the Facebook press conference room was, "What about Apple?"
Zuck answers
Again and again, Zuckerberg highlighted the openness of the Android platform, a feature that ultimately allowed Facebook to develop the Home overlay to fit on top of the operating system. He played the PR game, but his message about why Facebook went after Android devices is clear:
"We have a great relationship with Apple, and the way you work on all these operating systems is pretty different," Zuckerberg said during a post-conference Q&A. "So Apple is a very controlled environment.
"The good news there is we have this long, good relationship with Apple. We are integrated into the operating system, we have an active dialogue to do more with them, but ultimately anything that happens with Apple is going through partnership with them.
"Now Google is aware of what we're doing, we've talked with them about this and all of that, but fundamentally Android is just a more open system, so we don't have to work directly with them in order to build an experience like this or even go deeper than what we're talking about today.
"They've designed Android from the ground up to support deep integration like this."
Source : techradar[dot]com
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