Facebook has an interesting history with mobile devices. After their initial move of their now hugely used apps onto smartphones, there were a lot of rumours about a potential Facebook phone that was going to arrive in 2010 from a partnership with HTC.
Well, 3 years on there’s no phone and Zuckerberg himself has debunked the rumours more than once; saying:
“Let’s say we build a phone,” he said in September. “We’re not, but if we did, we could maybe get 10 to 20 million people to use it … It doesn’t move the needle for us. The strategy we have is different from every other tech company [like Apple] that’s building their own hardware system — we’re going in the opposite direction.”
So, myth busted.
Or is it?
As of the 29th of March Facebook sent out invites to an event on the 4th of April where they are saying that they are going to show us all their “New Home on Android”.
What does this mean?
Well, there’re a few different theories as to what’s going on, with most of the rumour mill leaning towards an HTC Facebook phone as despite Zuckerberg denying that’s what they’re doing, Apple did a very similar thing with the iPad Mini and now it’s the most prolific selling tablet in the world. TechCrunch have reported that they see the most likely result of this will be a HTC phone running a heavily modified version of Android. The best way to think of it would be like how Amazon technically runs Android on it’s devices, but they don’t look anything like the vanilla Android on say, the Nexus devices.
This theory actually has some backing in reality as it’s been reported that Facebook and HTC have been talking to each other over a combined marketing campaign, which brings back the rumour of a couple of years ago with Facebook and HTC creating a phone together. Facebook have also been very successfully getting into every nook and cranny of Android, so the idea of them deploying a heavily skinned version of the OS isn’t exactly outwith speculation.
The other theory is that this is Facebook releasing some kind of new heavily embedded app for Android that will act as a social media hub for them.
Either way, it sounds like Facebook is planning something pretty big.
But, running with the idea of a Facebook phone for a moment, what could it potentially mean for the mobile world?
Well, first off it would mean there was another competitor on the market that also has the vast number of users to perhaps create an instant push of devices into the wider world. It would also mean that Facebook was looking to join Google, Apple, Amazon and others in the manufacturers and mobile trend setters club.
Now does indeed seem to be the time that many different companies are starting to get into the mobile business. Mozilla has FireFox, Jolla has Sailfish and whilst Samsung are already giants in the industry, they still want to use Tizen as a way to escape Google’s hold over the OS that they use. It would make sense that Facebook have seen the way that things are going and want to join the wave.
On the other hand though, do we really need another version of Android out there? Or indeed, another OS in general? As much as it’s nice to have a choice as a consumer, there’s something to be said for the ease of having many different types of handset but only a couple of OS that exists on them. This is certainly what made Windows so ubiquitous during the 90s and early 2000s, multiple manufacturers, one OS.
Whether that’s where mobile is ultimately headed is a different story, but we’ll find out soon enough if Facebook has a phone of their own up their sleeve.
