Facebook Home for Android is official, coming April 12

Facebook went live with its Home for Android. It's a launcher which replaces your normal homescreen with "Cover Feed" - a tool which gives you a gesture-operated aggregation of your friends' posts, pictures, statuses, etc.

Facebook Home will launch on Google Play on April 12 for a select number of smartphones, initially - the Samsung Galaxy S4, S III and Note II and the HTC One and One X+. It appears to act as any launcher out there. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the team behind Facebook Home worked hard to make it feel better than just any other app, which means we can expect Home to work seamlessly or like a native app.

Here's Cover Feed in action - holding a finger over an image will open it up in fullscreen, while double-tapping will Like the picture.

Facebook Home integrates with your messaging too. It introduces a feature called "Chat heads" - upon receiving a message you'll get a floating notification showing you the image of the sender. Chat Heads styling is applied both to normal texts and Facebook messages alike. Here's a demo.

Facebook Home has some gestures that are designed to help with notifications too. Holding a finger over a single notification will stack all of them and give you the option to dismiss.

Here's a demo of the notification system running on the HTC First.

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