As soon as Facebook launched its immersive Home skin of Android for select phones, a hacker released a version of Home that can be installed on nearly any Android phone or tablet.
Facebook Home was introduced to the public less than two weeks ago and launched on Friday. It is designed to let you have deeper access to your Facebook friends and their status updates. But the software is only available on a small number of phones: Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC One X, and HTC One X+. It will also be available on the Samsung Galaxy S IV and HTC One in the future.
Thankfully, the XDA Developers hacker theos0o has engineered a modified version of Facebook Home that can be installed as long as you allow your phone to install unofficial apps that aren’t in the Google Play store.
The hack is relatively simple versus other Android hacks. Here’s the order of operations:
- Uninstall the original Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Home applications if you already have them. If any Facebook apps are pre-installed on your device, you will likely need to root your phone to remove it.
- Download the hacked version of Facebook Home (link here) and hacked version of Facebook Messenger (link here). Extract the .rar files.
- Install the official Facebook app (com.facebook.katana), then the Facebook Home launcher (com.facebook.home), and then the Facebook Messenger app (com.facebook.orca).
- Enable Facebook Home under the Facebook app settings. Reboot your device.
- If you have any serious issues, reboot into recovery mode and wipe the Dalvik cache.
Facebook Home hasn’t received the kindest of reviews by users and as of this writing, the app has a 2.4 rating on Google Play. Out of about 3,470 ratings awarded, more than 1,600 of those ratings are for 1 star.
Still, that’s a relatively small number of people and there’s no telling what other Android devices will be getting Facebook Home in the future, so we thought we’d share these directions. Let us know in the comments below what you think of Facebook Home.
TUB Verdict: Slick experience and a must have for people who cant live without Facebook but geeks would probably take it off after a few minutes of use. We tried it for 5 mins and then wondered what next?
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