Facebook Home is coming. It\u2019s a unique threat to Google\u2019s mastery of Android that Google can blame nobody but itself for. It\u2019s the unique nature of the threat \u2014 both Home\u2019s technical foundation, and the nature of Facebook\u2019s rivalry with Google \u2014 that I believe makes Home the first real test of Google\u2019s \u201copen\u201d mantra regarding Android.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There have been many challenges to date, but most of them involve \u201cforks\u201d of the Android system: where another company builds their own system on top of a previous Android release. Amazon\u2019s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble\u2019s nook, and Samsung\u2019s rumored \/ assumed proprietary fork are all notable examples of Android derivatives. None of these to date have looked poised to take Android away from Mountain View anytime soon. Samsung, with its market share momentum and marketing prowess, could stand to be a significant threat, but for now its flagship products still run Google\u2019s \u201cstock\u201d Android, more or less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Horace Dediu\u00a0put it plainly<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Facebook Home can only reside on Android because only Google was daft enough to allow it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d add \u201cfor now.\u201d Now we get to see how true to its ethos Google and Android stay. How long will Home remain on the Google Play store? How often, and how mysteriously, will it have \u201ccompatibility issues\u201d with new releases? How long before launchers in general start to get buried under convenient categorization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the least, I expect an increased emphasis from Google on the virtues of \u201cstock\u201d Android, and an increased push to make that consistent for consumers. This is already underway on both\u00a0OEM<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0developer<\/a>\u00a0fronts, but Facebook\u2019s lurking presence will force the issue that much harder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Home\u2019s to-be-determined success could also force Apple\u2019s hand. Such a product is neither technically nor legally feasible on iOS at the moment, and Facebook\u2019s integration into iOS 6, while powerful, is much less than Facebook Home provides on Android, and thus presumably much less than Facebook wants on iOS. As I said\u00a0last week<\/a>,\u00a0if too many consumers start considering Facebook Home a deal breaker, Apple may need to make some moves of its own. How many consumers that is, and whether they\u2019ll in fact get on board, remains to be seen.\u00a0All of this just underscores what\u2019s at stake for everyone \u2014 Facebook most of all. With just one announcement, Facebook has made itself a strategic stakeholder in the mobile landscape. It\u2019s no longer just a website and an app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Google knew what it was doing when it made and marketed Android as an \u201copen\u201d system. It surely anticipated forks by handset makers as a manageable risk as long as Google kept advancing the system. But I wonder if it expected something like Facebook Home: an inside-out heist, made by a company after the same exact user data and advertisers Google is after. How it chooses to respond in the near future should give us an answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Facebook Home is coming. It\u2019s a unique threat to Google\u2019s mastery of Android that Google can blame nobody but itself for. It\u2019s the unique nature of the threat \u2014 both Home\u2019s technical foundation, and the nature of Facebook\u2019s rivalry with Google \u2014 that I believe makes Home the first real test of Google\u2019s \u201copen\u201d mantra […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}