Facebook Home and the first Facebook Phone, the HTC First, will both launch in a few days. However, if you’re adventurous enough you can try out Facebook Home right now! The three necessary APKs have all leaked online courtesy Modaco and can be downloaded and installed right now.
There are some limitations to this however. First, your phone must have a screen resolution under 1280×768. This APK doesn’t support resolutions higher than that. Secondly, if your phone came preloaded with Facebook you won’t be able to install this without root-access and a little know how. Here’s the instructions if you are rooted:
- Find the location of Facebook in your system partition (e.g. /system/app/Facebook.apk or perhaps /system/app/Facebook_Client.apk)
- Delete said file (after backing it up!)
- Reboot device
- Install Facebook from the Play Store then uninstall it
- Install above APKs
As with all tinkering endeavours, you do so at your own risk. However, if you’re just installing the APKs to a device that doesn’t already have Facebook (like all the Nexus devices) you should be pretty safe. But venture at your own risk! Visit the link below for the download links.
Update:
It looks like Facebook has shut down the APKs as users everywhere are reporting a blank screen rather than the normal Facebook Home. Did any of you guys at least get to try it out?
[Modaco]
