Facebook Home Earning Oodles Of Negative Feedback From Google Play Reviewers

facebookhomeEarlier this month, Facebook announced Facebook Home, the massive upgrade of its Android smartphone app that basically puts the social networking site front-and-center on your device. The app began rolling out to customers late last week, and some of the responses may have you waiting to press “update.”

As TheNextWeb mentioned shortly after the Friday release of Home, 1-star reviews immediately outpaced all the other higher star levels on the Google Play store.

In the days since, the ratios haven’t changed much, with 1-star reviews currently at 1,916. That’s more than all the 3-, 4-, and 5-star mentions combined, representing more than 47% of all reviews for the app.

A number of people griped about the usability of the app.

“Made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours,” writes one person. “Unless major changes are made including an easy way to get to my home screen I will not reinstall.”

“Not intuitive and it makes my phone butt ugly,” writes another.

A few other 1-star reviewers mention that the app appears to be hitting their phone’s battery pretty hard.

Of course, as we’ve mentioned before, people with negative experiences are often more motivated to express their opinions than those who are happy with a product or service, so it’s completely possible that these numbers don’t accurately represent how users feel. We haven’t had a chance to try Home yet so we can’t say whether these naysayers are responding accurately or overreacting.

It will be interesting to see if Home, which is really the first major-release app to integrate itself so fully into the Android operating system, will catch on or if the negative feedback will have an impact on the install base.

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