Facebook has reassured us that it’ll never make a smartphone again

Before Amazon gave us a good chuckle with the utter failure that was the Fire Phone, Facebook did the same thing with the HTC First. The hardware was lackluster, but that wasn’t supposed to matter, because the main selling point of the HTC-made smartphone was the fact that it had a bunch of Facebook bloatware pre-installed. Obviously, that wasn’t very enticing to anyone, and the device ended up going on sale for a mere $0.99 almost immediately. That’s why it’s not all that surprising that Facebook has confirmed that it’ll never made a smartphone again. 

Remember that, a few years back, up-and-rising social media giant Facebook teamed up with HTC to produce the HTC First. While the handset didn’t feature a spectacular spec list, it did bring something unique to the table: the model was bundled with a pack of Facebook-specific features and had Facebook pre-installed out of the box. However, the experiment proved to be a failure and soon the phone was made available for purchase for only $0.99 on contract, which is why the company is not really looking to produce a successor to the HTC First. At least according to Facebook’s Vice President of Messaging products Dave Marcus, who talked to CNET and said that the social network would “probably not” take up the endeavor of building another phone. Most of us have probably already forgotten about the Facebook-branded phone and the company knows better than to persist in a niche where it has no prospects of succeeding. After all, Facebook’s products, including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, are the apps that are most used by mobile users. So even if Facebook doesn’t have its own branded smartphone per se, it still has dominion over the mobile market, with 25% of the time spent on mobile phones dedicated to one of those applications.