JoltVib

Home takes status updates out of the Facebook app and slaps them right on your homescreen. Instead of little boxes scrolling vertically, however, each update from your News Feed becomes a full-screen photo with small bits of text at the top. You can let them flow by until your screen goes dark or swipe through them one by one.

The moment you power up your phone, you're greeted with the time up top, and your own profile picture at bottom in a little circle that Facebook calls a "bobble." These both quickly fade away to reveal your stream of News Feed updates, including images, text updates, links, and a couple others. Also, "Yup!", eventually Facebook will put ads in Cover Feed, though probably not on the first screen.

The overall design is quite good, with clean white fonts that are bolded for links and names, and each person's name and profile photo up top as well. The design is almost entirely "chromeless" in that there are none of the traditional buttons, sliders, and switches you usually see on a smartphone interface. Facebook also hides the traditional Android status bar, which shows your notifications, signal strength, and time. You can still get to it with a swipe down from the top (a second swipe brings down your notification drawer), and if you really want it back there's a setting for that.

As you play around, you quickly discover that you can tap once to toggle the "bobble" control at bottom on and off, double tap to like something, and swipe to move to the next update. There actually are a few buttons at bottom, but they're simple and clean icons: thumbs up for liking, a chat bubble for commenting, and a like/comment count. You can tap on the chat bubble to bring up the comments for that particular post and comment yourself. For posts without images (simple text updates or links), the image you see in the background is your friend's main cover image. All of the images pan slowly with a "Ken Burns" effect, and there's one more gesture — a long tap — that zooms the photo out so you can see the whole thing.

That's basically the entirety of what you can do in Cover Feed, but the simple interface works on both a functional and conceptual level. I found myself casually swiping through images when I turned on my phone instead of, well, doing whatever it was I intended to do when I turned the darn thing on. Facebook's basic addictive quality — seeing what your friends are doing — translates very well to this more immersive interface.

Of course, not every status update is a beautiful image or amusing bon mot. We all have friends who post garbage we don't really care about on Facebook and having that garbage on your lockscreen can be a jarring experience. For every baby photo and landscape scene, there was a fleeting image of my ex wife or an ill-informed political rant. Unfortunately, getting these images off of your homescreen is a trial, because you can't directly hide something in Cover Feed. Instead, you need to go to the Facebook app itself and hunt down the offending post, then hide it there. Cover Feed definitely got me using Facebook more, but part of my increased usage included unfollowing a bunch of people's updates. Sorry, but there are really only so many pictures of omelets I need to see on a Sunday morning, and most of them I don't really want on my homescreen.

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