CHART OF THE DAY: What Facebook Got Wrong About How People Use Their Smartphones
Mark Zuckerberg had a strong case this week for why Facebook is making its new Home app for Android that replaces your normal Android home screen.
According to Zuckerberg, smartphone users spend more time in Facebook than any other individual app, so by that logic, it's a good idea to make Facebook the first thing users see when they switch their devices on.
But just because Facebook is the most-used app for smartphone users, doesn't mean it's the only one people want to see. In fact, social networking only makes up about a quarter of iPhone and Android app usage, according to Flurry Analytics.
Based on these data, it's pretty clear that even though Facebook might be the most-used individual app, smartphone users prefer to spend a large majority of their time doing other stuff.
So it's a real head-scratcher that Facebook Home is designed to wipe out the kind of apps most people like to use in favor of Cover Feed, Facebook's new home screen that displays a slide show of your friends' photos and status updates. If you want to access your other apps, you have to press a separate button to bring them up.
Facebook's assumption is that most people use their phones primarily to interact with friends, not do stuff like play games, check email or Twitter, or listen to music. That's going to be the biggest problem with the Facebook Home because Facebook is looking at individual app usage, not the type of apps people prefer to use.
Even if you do decide to add Facebook Home to your phone, you're likely to use most of your time using a variety of other apps and games that Facebook goes out of its way to hide from you. Facebook Home is great it all you want to do is see what your friends are up to, but when it comes to getting to the stuff you're likely to want to do, you have to jump through a few hoops.
That's going to turn a lot of people off.