Facebook: 'Our Home is on mobiles'

Announcing a new mobile phone application that replaces users’ home screens with updates from friends and integrates text messages with Facebook chat, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the new strategy was “mobile best”, rather than “mobile first”, The Telegraph reports.

The new plan, however, which includes an app available for a limited number of the most popular phones made by HTC and Samsung as well as a new mid-range device, called the First, from HTC was immediately met with some scepticism.

In a Q&A session after the announcement in California, Mr Zuckerberg admitted that adverts would also form a part of the new homescreen, meaning that an “experience” sold as pushing the site’s 1 billion users closer to their friends will also push them closer to advertisers.

Facebook is forecast to take one third of the total money spent on mobile advertising in the coming year, and already derives a third of its revenue from mobile. Although shares rose immediately after the announcement, investors remain cautious about the site’s ability to effectively make money from users on mobile phones, especially as more of them are using cheaper devices with smaller screens.

The new app, called Facebook Home, will launch on April 12 in America and around the world in the following weeks, and is only available for Android phones. Many of the features it introduces are unlikely to be popular on the Apple iPhone or iPad because of the way Apple controls the software. Mr Zuckerberg repeatedly stressed that what he was doing was only possible because of the way Google built the operating system. But with the support of Sony and Huawei as well as Samsung and HTC, the new service represents a challenge to Google’s dominance of its own Android operating system and implicitly downgrades the importance of search and email.

Mr Zuckerberg claimed that even the latest phones still used a user interface that was 30 years out of date, asking “What if phones were about people, not apps?” He predicted that with just 2billion people of the world’s population online, the majority of future users would expect phones to be about people.