Facebook Home Is Dead

Facebook Home is an interesting idea. Notice I didn’t say that in the past tense because their effort is still ongoing with monthly updates now three months after it debuted. Their Android launcher/conversion kit was built on a lot of interesting ideas within Facebook and designed for the user who really just uses their phone to check on friend statuses and News Feeds. Unfortunately, it looks like much of that initial spice is gone now and it’s going to be an even tougher uphill battle to get things done. Here’s what happened.

HTC’s Facebook Phone Bombed

In Facebook’s initial announcement, they brought up HTC CEO Peter Chou – whose company has been suffering heavily at the hands of Samsung’s Galaxy line of phones – who had commissioned a mid-range design and loaded it with Facebook Home’s ready-to-go environment right out of the box. No one was interested though and AT&T recently cleared out the last of their inventory after marking the phone down from $99 to $.99. Aside from the fact that it was a middling phone, you could actually turn Facebook Home off and get a, well, middling phone with stock Android on it.