Hobbi

~ the obit ~

Almost nobody alive holds an opinion about Hobbi, which makes it an odd product to bury. Sensor Tower and Apptopia both put its lifetime installs somewhere between seven and ten thousand. That is a rounding error against anything else Facebook shipped that decade, and it was the entire global audience.

It went onto the iOS App Store on 13 February 2020, built by Facebook's New Product Experimentation team. The tagline was "document, share and engage on the things you love to do." You photographed a project while you worked on it, the app arranged the photos into a collection, and when you finished it stitched a highlight video out of them.

Press coverage all landed on the same comparison. The grid of photo cards looked like Pinterest, Facebook was known to want what Pinterest had, so Hobbi was a Pinterest clone and that was the story everywhere. What it actually did was closer to a private scrapbook, with no feed of strangers to scroll through and nobody else's projects to find.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the npe pattern ~

The New Product Experimentation team was set up in 2019 to ship small apps quickly under the Facebook name and to shut them down without ceremony afterward. That arrangement was stated openly at the time, which makes Hobbi's five months a success by the team's own standard rather than a failure by anyone else's.

The charter produced a run of these small apps, Tuned for couples and Collab for music among them. Hobbi was switched off on the same date as Lasso, the company's short-video answer to TikTok, in a single announcement at the end of June 2020.

~ ten thousand people ~

The download estimate carries this entire obituary, so the number deserves some precision. Seven to ten thousand installs over five months is what a mid-sized app collects on a slow afternoon. Facebook never marketed Hobbi and never shipped it on Android, so it had no route to the social graph that normally makes a Facebook product spread.

Users were told it was over by push notification, which is a tidy detail: the app's single largest audience moment was the message announcing its death. Pinterest, for its part, had gone public in April 2019 and is still trading.

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