Gadgetory

Facebook just announced home for Android an app that turns your lockscreen and you're constantly updating newsfeed for your friends that's a big deal but it also announced chat heads notifications from Facebook messenger that show up on top of any app you're using on your Android phone Facebook realizes it needs to win big in the messaging space even if that means putting your friends faces inside every app you're using this is the future of Facebook messaging one thing that you may not know is that Facebook as a company when you pretty much run our entire company on Facebook groups you don't use mailing lists there are over 400 million active groups on Facebook 80 million of those groups are secret and so dovetailing off that we said well how else can people connect more privately private sharing is like a really really important thing for Facebook and I think things like status updates and photo posts and stuff in newsfeed just gets way more visibility so people I think only think that we think about newsfeed and these other things but you know a lot of people don't like to share publicly and a lot of people and that's totally fine we're not saying hey everything has to be public and like every time you send a message we're gonna like throw it in newsfeed or something yeah like that's not it at all so we started focusing on this we started building the team first we did the belukha acquisition a couple years ago and we've grown a team around that too now where we have a ton of people thinking about the problem from different angles as Facebook put more thought and resources into developing intimate experiences it began to focus more on its users most intimate devices their phones so last year we did this without some thing where we took mobile and we ate you know where a mobile became a mobile first company which means every single team at Facebook builds their own mobile experiences right so there's not one mobile team at Central it's like hey I want to put a feature request in it's like no the messages team is responsible for the holistic messages experience on web on blackberry on an iPhone on Android everywhere I think snapchat is really awesome like we're all super addicted to it and we think it's great I think there's a lot of other people who are doing really cool things and I think phones are becoming way more pervasive and everyone has them and if not everyone's going to be getting them not only did Facebook realize that needed to focus on mobile it also started to embrace the nature of the best and most popular mobile software simple single utility apps but Facebook thought something was missing when you're solid away inside of those apps your friends we always talked about how like apps with messaging components are always the best and so it's like oh man like that white like why doesn't chrome have like a built-in messenger or something and it was me and another designer named Brandon walk in and we worked from home on Wednesday one time and we already been working on like messaging but we just had some ideas around messaging so we just like stayed up that whole day and all night and like buy other roommates work here and they were always coming in and being like yeah what he was working on all the stuff and we actually just worked like around the clock for like two days on this idea and basically had the whole chat heads idea fleshed out at that point in time it all starts on the phone we invest a ton at Facebook in really awesome design tools that allow the designers to prototype everything so at the end of that second day like Brandon and I had working prototypes of in a sense a lot of the interactions that exist in today's four years the best mobile Facebook experience has been on the iPhone but as Facebook's ambitions grew so did its desires to focus on a platform more flex Boldin iOS we got the original video from our designer Joey Flynn and Brendon Walken and then just kind of saw that it was really cool and try to actually implement it like they made that video we think that social and people should be part of the phone and Android is a platform that lets us enhance all different parts of the phone before this I had only ever worked on iOS products and I used an iPhone and I wasn't super familiar with Android but I'd always heard these horror stories and everyone kind of always makes a big deal like it's gonna be inherently worse because it's on and like the touch latency and everything and I think if you think that then that's what will come out of it but we were just like oh yeah this has to be the best possible experience we've built and if it requires rewriting like base level views like you know scroll view and you know like ListView and all of these sitting like pager we spent a long time making our pager really great then it just feels like it's a great experience on any phone we spent so much time digging through the Android source code trying to figure out you know how to use the simple compositor how to not bring battery all this kind of stuff and it was pretty intense we built like an entire physics engine that everything runs off of it's more like your app is built like a game as opposed to your app built with like these app components it is interesting just like even using the word Android II it has like a lot of these baked in things where you feel like it has to fit some certain aesthetic or have some certain kind of like patterns that it evolves around but we Android is a great platform for us and we just were like hey we're not like we're not gonna try to make this thing feel androidy for the sake of making it feel Android II people see the chatez feature even employees inside the company be like you know I would actually get an Android phone now so I can get these chat heads because they're so cool so that was pretty gratifying for me too the problem that we're trying to solve on Android we can solve it a hundred percent of the time right because we can have chat heads available in other apps people are still spending 20% of their time in Facebook for iOS so we can solve that problem for them for that 20% clearly you know we'd love to be able to bring that experience to other apps as well and Android is a platform that lets us enhance all different parts of the phone and bring that social layer and bring people first see I think I definitely think using this this is the best version of Facebook that ever I've ever used and it makes my phone like alive and feel social the open nature of Android allows Facebook to create private messaging experience layered on top of all of their apps on your phone Facebook wants to be wherever you're chatting with your friends and today that place is increasingly mobile this is just the beginning of Facebook taking over your phone there's something about chat heads which is that provides a lot of more opportunities that I think no one has been able to explore yet just because I think this is kind of the first of its kind is being able to like integrate with other apps so you could say you know if you're in maps you could like pick up the map and like this drop it to a prayer you know there's like a lot of opportunities to do really cool stuff like that we're just scratching the surface of the potential of what we can do in integrating with Android to really make it a communication hub and something again that feels alive and like your friends are with you on screen so I think there's there's a lot of stuff that we can we can do in the future it's it's exciting