Facebook Home opens to poor reviews

User reviews of Facebook Home, the social network’s new home screen feature for Android phones, are coming in pretty weak.

A day after Facebook released the software on Google Play, the app has garnered 2,219 reviews, with an average rating of 2.5 stars. Some 976 people left a one-star rating.

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Bottom line: 43 percent of all reviewers are giving the poorest rating they can.

Most reviewers express disappointment that the feature is just a launcher and that it puts them further away from their chosen home screen carrying their dashboard of apps.

Notably, even some reviewers who give higher ratings to Facebook Home said they probably wouldn’t use it. For example, one user who gave it five stars called it “slick,” but said it is really for people who can’t live without Facebook. The reviewer said he’d uninstall it and prefers the normal Facebook app:

Facebook Home is available on select smartphones, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC One X, and HTC One X+.

Last week, Facebook showed off its Home software for the first time. It allows you to see full-screen updates from friends on the your home screen, send messages, and more things that are key to the Facebook experience.

In a review of the HTC First, the first phone with Home pre-installed, our writer Jolie O’Dell gave Home high marks for making Android playful and helpful immerse us in Facebook news feed items that we’d normally miss. However, she has some reservations about privacy on the device and how much personal and location data will be shared with Facebook.

[Hat tip: Nextweb.]

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