Listen up, food porn posters and cat video fanatics…Facebook has a new app, and it just might be the one you replace the old social media app with on your iPhone. Nine months in the making, the team at Facebook has finally released the long-rumored Paper app.
First, it’s only available for your iPhone (sorry Galaxy fans), but it looks and behaves a lot like the Facebook app for Android tablets, so Android users aren’t left entirely out in the cold. Of course, this is a massive step up from the Poke app, which was the last thing Facebook tried to do to get creative.
One final kudos mention for Paper is the way Facebook has rolled it out. Rather than trying to replace Facebook for its billion-or-so users (remember the outrage over Timelines?), Paper’s availability only on iPhone lets them gauge what users do and don’t like about the entirely revamped way to use Facebook without having to interfere with a good-sized country’s population-worth of users.
So what makes Paper so newsworthy? Well, the news. The app makes the entire interface work like a crisp newspaper, lumping news stories, statues updates, and even its compose feature into a more reader-friendly format. By stripping away almost all of the touchable buttons and relying on patterns of screen swipes to navigate, the experience looks and feels a lot more like a magazine-styled app. Even the feature that moves the user through a photograph by tilting the phone rather than swiping is more intuitive, and much more in line with how readers would move an actual photograph to see more.
Paper will be released February 3rd, but early reports from sneak peekers are already claiming that, while Facebook won’t be going anywhere, the app that iOS users have come to rely on may quickly be replaced with Paper.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.