Facebook Home

» see facebook.com/home as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Facebook Home was an Android launcher that replaced the home screen with Cover Feed, a full-bleed slideshow of friends' photos and status updates. Notifications became Chat Heads, floating circle avatars you could drag around on top of whatever else you were doing. Zuckerberg unveiled it on April 4, 2013 with the slogan that phones should be designed around people first, apps second. The HTC First was the bundled hardware. AT&T launched it eight days later at $99 on contract.

The Google Play reviews were brutal within hours. People had bought a phone, not a Facebook accessory. Cover Feed replaced the lock screen. Widgets stopped working. The traditional app drawer was buried two taps deep. Forty-eight percent of the first 7,000 reviewers gave it one star. Battery drain was real. AT&T cut the HTC First price to 99 cents within a month, sold around 15 thousand units total, and discontinued the hardware before summer. Facebook kept patching Home for the next year and a half, but the standalone launcher quietly disappeared from Google Play in 2014.

Facebook Home never reached turkey at meaningful scale. The HTC First was an at&t exclusive in the us, never carried by turk telekom or turkcell, and by 2013 the local android crowd was on samsung galaxy s3 / s4 hardware running touchwiz. I was 29, working full-time, and watched the launch coverage on the verge with the same detachment I had for any us carrier-bundled phone story.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Facebook had been on every smartphone for years as just-another-icon. Home tried to flip that. Open the phone, you saw the news feed. Tap an avatar, message threads opened as floating bubbles you could move around. It was a real product. Not a skin, not a widget pack, an actual launcher that wanted to be the whole shell. For a week the tech press treated it like Facebook was making a phone OS.

~ the fall ~

The first cracks appeared at the lock screen. Cover Feed used your data plan to refresh photos in the background, and people noticed their battery and their monthly cap evaporating. Then the Android crowd realized the new launcher had stripped widgets, app folders, and most of the customization that android people care about specifically because they did not buy an iphone. Google Play comments turned into a wall of one-star explanations. The mainstream press swung from launch-day enthusiasm to "what is wrong with this thing" inside two weeks.

~ what it became ~

Chat Heads survived. The floating-bubble message UI got rolled into Facebook Messenger as a feature, then copied by every other chat app on android over the next five years. Cover Feed died with Home. The HTC First became a punchline at carrier stores. Facebook never tried to ship a launcher again, switched its mobile strategy to owning specific app surfaces (Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp), and spent the next decade trying to escape google and apple's distribution at the os level through different routes. Oculus, Portal, Ray-Ban Meta, all of them descend from the same problem Home tried to solve directly.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »