Just a day after announcing a new Android skin in the form of Facebook Home, the company has issued a FAQ regarding Facebook Home and privacy. → Read More
This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about bold moves by Verizon and T-Mobile and the Facebook Fone and Facebook Home. → Read More
Well, that didn’t take long – Facebook Home is already being parodied on YouTube, in a video which actually ends up making a few biting comments about the potential problems the new application will face. For example, will the promised monthly updates to Facebook Home end up confusing users as to the basics of how their phone operates? Where will the ads (you know they’re coming) eventually… → Read More
Google’s statement on Facebook’s introduction of “Home” was short and sweet, but very telling, so let’s dissect it a little bit. As we noted earlier, Facebook went with Android first because of its flexibility. Basically it’s easy to customize. Other platforms, not so much. Zuckerberg even mentioned that Windows Phone might be a bit easier to work with, calling… → Read More
Facebook is absolutely, positively, 100 percent not working on a phone.
The first rule of tech news remains intact: when a company says they’re definitely not doing something, it’s as sure a sign as you can get that they will eventually do said thing. → Read More
Shortly after Facebook’s Home announcement, I got to chat with Tom Allison, Facebook’s Android Engineering Manager. We discussed his favorite parts of Home, how much they changed the underlying OS, and the biggest challenges they faced during Home’s development.
Plus: A bonus look at Home running on a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and a peek at how Home can happily co-exist with your old homescreen. → Read More
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be discussing the latest trends in digital advertising with representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter at the end of April during TechCrunch Disrupt in New York.
My goal for the panel is to give attendees from both Madison Avenue and the startup world an overview of the latest products and opportunities from the major online ad platforms. We’ll talk about… → Read More
Facebook announced them earlier, and now Orange France and EE in the UK have confirmed it: they will be the first two carriers in Europe to carry the 4G HTC First, the first Android device with Facebook’s new Android launcher, Facebook Home, embedded in it. Although AT&T revealed pricing and preorders from today — at $99 — the two European carriers are still mum on how much it will cost and… → Read More
After Facebook introduced “Home,” its new launcher for Android phones that will help you engage with your friends quickly without having to open the actual app, I asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if such a product could ever find its way to iOS. Clearly, the reason for “starting with Android,” as Zuckerberg put it at the beginning of the Home event, is because… → Read More
Facebook’s event today was all about a new “Home on Android,” and that’s exactly what Facebook Home delivers. The Android launcher integrates Facebook features into most aspects of the Android smartphone experience, eliminating the need to jump into a dedicated Facebook app in most situations. Here’s a breakdown of what Facebook Home is all about. → Read More
Facebook today announced that AT&T and France Telecom/Orange are the first two carriers to be part of its Facebook Home partnership program to develop devices with the social network’s new integrated user experience, which will kick off with the a 4G phone, the HTC First. AT&T will be offering it as an exclusive in the U.S. at a price of $99.99 with preorders starting today. HTC First is… → Read More
Today at the Facebook phone event, the company unveiled Facebook Home, an Android “app” that will change your phone’s home screen and core features. It will be released in the Play Store on April 12, with an update coming every month. At first, Facebook Home will only work on selected devices, because the company needs to work with hardware partners to make it compatible. The HTC… → Read More
The torrent of leaks these past few days haven’t left much to the imagination, but HTC’s Peter Chou has just officially pulled back the curtain on the first phone to ship with Facebook Home — the HTC First — at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters.
According to HTC CEO Peter Chou the First will be the “ultimate social phone,” though he declined to dig into the device’s specs during his brief… → Read More
As predicted, Facebook announced a way to turn your Android phone into one focused on people and not apps, as we’ve grown accustomed to on computers and mobile devices. “We don’t want to build a phone or operating system that only some people could use,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, adding that he wants to do more than build something for 1-2 percent of the smartphone… → Read More
Good morning, Internet! We’re live from Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, where the company is expected to finally detail the bordering-on-mythical Facebook Phone. Will it be just one phone? Will it be software to turn many Android phones into the Facebook Phone? We’re here to find out! → Read More
Facebook’s next billion users don’t have smartphones or even the Internet yet, but the Facebook Phone could change that. Through savvy carrier deals, subsidized handsets, and free limited data access, Facebook could ensure emerging markets come online with friend requests as their first experience. That could turn populations of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America into Facebookers for life. → Read More
With the Facebook “Phone” project due to be announced in a few hours, it’s worth remembering Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said building a phone is “so clearly the wrong strategy for us.” At TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF conference last September, Michael Arrington grilled Zuckerberg about it. → Read More
Ambient intimacy, accelerated social life, thawed relations between Google and Facebook, and an iPhone that looks impersonal by comparison. These are just a few of the short-term ripple effects of the Facebook “Phone” project to be unveiled April 4th. In this video, I recap leaked intel from my sources and 9To5Google, show photos of the phone itself plus its software, and discuss why you should… → Read More
As we move closer to the launch of the (probably awful) Facebook phone, let’s examine just what the social network and its ilk have created. Millions of us use these new tools to joke, flirt and share memories, but just as many of us use these tools much to our disadvantage. In some ways, however, that is making things better for all of us. → Read More
Nir Goldschlager just saved your identity. One of the world’s top white hat security researchers, Goldschlager this week helped Skype and Dropbox fix a critical security flaw that could have let hackers take control of their users’ Facebook accounts. Tomorrow Goldschlager will detail how he found the exploit, but he gave TechCrunch the early heads up. Here’s how hackers exploit the hole. → Read More
Instagram has been around for what feels like forever, but it seems like just yesterday that the app migrated over to Android after being a long-time iOS exclusive. Today marks one year of Instagram’s presence on Android, and to celebrate the company shared on its blog that in just that short time around half of its users come from Android.
Last we heard, Instagram had over 100 million active… → Read More
Twitter is making a move to become the jumping off point for discovering, browsing and accessing the mobile app ecosystem, the company announced yesterday, in a somewhat understated event only developers were invited to attend. The event, due to its nature, was filled with geekier terminology like “footer tags,” “deep linking,” and “URL schemes,” making summaries of its announcements hard to parse… → Read More
The HTC hardware that’s being prepped as the delivery mechanism for Facebook Home, which has lots more potential than the device itself, supposedly leaked in the image above. The render, tweeted by Evleaks, a consistent source of pre-release Android hardware info, doesn’t look like much: it’s destined to be a mid-range device, after all, according to early leaks. → Read More
Let’s say we build a phone, theoretically. We’re not! But if we did, we could get maybe 10 million people to use it. 20 million. That doesn’t move the needle for us.
With today’s leaks, it’s looking like Zuck was being almost completely honest.
They aren’t building a Facebook Phone. They’re letting HTC do it for them.
But that’s probably not the end goal, here. → Read More
Facebook’s new “Home” on Android will debut on a mediocre HTC handset codenamed “Myst” but will be available on standard Android phones, according to an autopsy of a leaked developer build of the Facebook “phone” software scored by Android Police. This aligns with our scoop and predictions from last week about what Facebook will launch at its big press event on Thursday. → Read More
Facebook is making an announcement this Thursday, and our own Josh Constine reports that at this event we’ll see the company unveil its own slightly tweaked flavor of Android, to power select HTC smartphones. But why would the company do that, and why now? A new report from Reuter provides very good motivation: Facebook sees a potential threat in the growing success of mobile-first messaging… → Read More
The mainstream has had little reason to care that Android gives developers much more customization freedom than iOS. But if Facebook’s fabled Android homescreen is a hit, the stubbornness of Apple’s closed mobile platform could be framed as a drawback after years of its cohesive design and ease being seen as assets. → Read More
Constant, close contact with your friends. That’s the promise of a “Facebook phone”. The modified Android OS and mobile homescreen replacement sources tell us Facebook will unveil April 4th pushes your social life to you so fetching it isn’t interruptive. The News feed brought us ambient intimacy, but Facebook’s homescreen could turn that social graph awareness into a sixth sense. → Read More
Facebook just announced some improvements to the mobile app install ads that it launched last fall, allowing app developers to target their ads with more nuance.
These ads run in Facebook’s news feed, and when clicked on, they open up the download page in the Apple App Store and Google Play marketplace. The company says that by using these ads, Poshmark has seen a 3x increase in ROI compared to… → Read More
Notice a little extra red in the blue sea of Facebook the past couple of days?
That’s a new picture shared by the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for LGBT individuals and their allies, which is being used to show support for marriage equality. → Read More
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