Newsletter
Back in July, Facebook rolled out some updated controls for the News Feed to iOS users with the promise that the same new controls would be hitting Android devices in the “coming weeks.” Well, it looks like that time has finally come as some Android users are reporting that they now have the new News Feed preferences on their devices. Although, the update will likely be a staggered rollout, which means that not all Android users will have access to these new preferences within the app just yet.
What these new News Feed preferences bring to the table are three simplified customization features. The first of said features is “Prioritize who to see first,” which allows users to select friends or pages whose posts they would like to see at the top of their News Feed. The second of these new options is “Unfollow people to hide their posts” and this is essentially a glorified unfollow mechanism for unfollowing friends or pages so that users do not have to see their posts anymore. And last but not least there is “Reconnect with people you unfollowed,” which does exactly what the name implies, gives users a list of friends that they have unfollowed in the past and gives them the option to follow them again.
When you take a step back and look at these new News Feed preferences you will probably notice that there isn’t really much that is new here. The new options allow you to customize things that you already could in the past, although they are significantly easier to do using this new method. This new simpler method to do these things is good considering not everyone who uses the Facebook app is going to be a technology wizard who knows how to do these things. If you want to see if your Facebook app on Android has the new preferences yet, they are easy to locate. All you have to do is tap the hamburger menu on the top right of the Facebook app and then scroll down to the ‘Help and Settings’ section. There you may see the new preferences called ‘News Feed Preferences.’ Simply tap that and you will gain access to all of these new options for customizing your News Feed.