Product manager at the time, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri returned to Facebook’s plan to launch its smartphone.
Today, Meta is best known for its social networks. However, the company formerly known as Facebook once considered entering the smartphone market, with the HTC First. A project that ended in failure. Product manager within the company at the time, Adam Mosseri, now head of Instagram, returned to this failed project which dates back to the early 2010s.
“It is clearly a failure, but we have taken many good design ideas into the main applications (…) A lot of lessons have been learned,” he said on the social network Threads.
A response to criticism
Adam Mosseri published this message in response to a publication by Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the American media The Verge. In his post, the latter criticized Facebook’s phone, saying that its camera was “crummy”, its processor “mediocre” and that “the best thing you could do with it was turn off all Facebook ideas” for the run under Android Stock.
Android Stock is the pure version of Google’s mobile operating system, before smartphone manufacturers, like Samsung or Xiaomi, apply their overlays (alternative versions of Android).
With its project, Facebook wanted to offer an overlay called “Facebook Home”, which integrated several functions of the social network. For example, it was possible to see the news feed on the home and lock screens.
The HTC First was such a failure that European operators like Orange and EE canceled its launch in Europe. Due to disastrous sales in the United States, it was even sold for less than a dollar, or 99 dollars less than its initial price.
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