Facebook Making Home More Livable With Customizable Launcher Dock And Now Folders

Many iOS and Android users employ folders to keep their home screens manageable and tidy even if they’ve downloaded dozens of apps. You might put all your news reading, restaurant finding, or puzzle gaming apps in the categorized folders. That makes it a lot quicker to find a certain app than trying to recognize it amidst a sea of icons or using search to pull it up. Facebook has updated Home with a customizable launcher and folders. With today’s update, when you drag apps on top of each other, they create a folder you can name.

It’s working on widget support — another sacrifice Home users wouldn’t have to make. It’s also trying to improve the NUX — the new user experience of Home. Right now it’s quite confusing, especially for tech novices and Android virgins. With NUX, dock, folders, and widgets worked out, it might finally be a fair fight between Home and more traditional versions of Android. Facebook would sure like to see the usage rates go up considering how long it’s worked on its “apperating system”.

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But there’s one more obvious stumbling block Facebook has to deal with: transitioning people from Android to Home.

Right now, even if you have folders or a dock set up on your old version of Android, when you switch to Home, you lose them. Facebook hasn’t figured out how (or if) it can import these personalization preferences. For Home to be a success, it can’t heap a ton of extra work on people. No one wants to re-drag all their apps into folders again, then name them all, then choose what goes in their dock, and then reconfigure all their widgets.

Home’s appeal is already limited to serious social networkers. To stand a chance, it needs to be purely additive, not a trade-off. Once it’s no longer hampered by objective technical shortcomings, people will be able to make a unbiased decision about whether they want to organize their world around people or apps.

Source: Tech Crunch