Advertisement

Facebook Home official on the HTC One, unofficial on Galaxy S 4 (but you can use it anyway)

When it first announced Home, Facebook said that it would support the HTC One and Galaxy S 4 as soon as they arrived. But unless you were into sideloading, any attempt to actually run it on either of those two handsets was greeted with a "not supported" message -- at least until now. Though the app version hasn't changed and there's no mention of support for new handsets, the HTC One now appears to be officially supported, and after bypassing a warning (see the image above), you can now download and run it unofficially on the GS4 as well. That requires the main Facebook app to be up-to-date, however, and we noticed that Home (which has a tiny download size) leans on its much bigger brother for most of the heavy lifting -- updating Facebook actually changes features in the Home app.

Android Central noted that it also worked in that way for other previously unsupported devices it tried, namely the Sony Xperia ZL and HTC One X. However, we still couldn't even download the app on the Nexus 4 or LG Optimus G, although it worked just fine via a sideload -- producing the same warning and allowing us to "use home anyway." That jibes with what Facebook told us yesterday -- namely, that it would change permissions so that sideloaders would get all the updates and not be saddled forever with version 1.0.

Myriam Joire contributed to this report.