So AT&T quietly took the knife to the HTC First this week. The phone that was supposed to be "the Facebook phone" launched April 12th at $99.99 with a two-year contract, and as of a couple days ago you can walk into a store and get one for ninety-nine cents. Not ninety-nine dollars. Cents. That's a 99% price cut in about three weeks, which is not the kind of chart you want your product's first quarter to look like.
I want to say I'm surprised, but I'm really not, and I think a lot of people who actually used Facebook Home for more than the demo aren't either.
Here's the thing about Home that got lost in all the launch-day coverage back in April: it's not really an app, it's a home screen replacement that takes over your Android phone and turns it into a Facebook viewing device first and a phone second. Cover Feed puts your friends' photos full-screen behind everything, which looks nice in a keynote and gets old fast when you just want to check the time and instead get somebody's brunch. You can "Chat Head" your way into Messenger from anywhere, sure, but the tradeoff is your launcher, your app drawer, basically the whole texture of the phone, gets bent around one company's product roadmap. I tried it on a friend's phone for about twenty minutes at a coffee shop and handed it back feeling like I'd been given a rental car with someone else's radio presets locked in.
And that's before you get into the actual HTC First hardware, which by most accounts was fine. Not exciting, not bad, just a mid-range Android phone that happened to have this UI shell bolted onto it. Nobody was buying it for the phone. They were either buying it because they wanted Home specifically (a pretty small group, it turns out) or they weren't buying it at all, and AT&T being the sole US carrier for it didn't exactly help move volume.
What gets me is how fast this fell apart. We're talking about three weeks between "here's the future of how you'll use your phone" and "please, for the love of god, take this off our hands for less than a pack of gum." I remember when Facebook Home was announced back in April there was this whole cycle of "is this the Facebook phone we always wondered about" pieces, and my honest reaction at the time was that Facebook doesn't actually want to make hardware, they want your home screen, and grafting that onto a single mid-tier device on a single carrier was never going to prove much either way. Now we have an answer and it's a pretty blunt one.
The app itself is still available as a free download for a handful of other Android phones if you want Home without buying the First, and I'd bet that's where Facebook's actual interest lives going forward, not in owning a phone SKU. Trying to convince a carrier to subsidize your app as a $99 phone was always a weird go-to-market move dressed up as a hardware launch.
None of this means Facebook's wrong to keep pushing into your phone. Messenger's Chat Heads are honestly a decent idea even divorced from Home, and I wouldn't be shocked if that piece survives while the rest of it gets quietly retired. But as an experiment in "what if your lock screen belonged to us," a dollar price tag three weeks in is about as clear a verdict as the market gives.
Anyway, I spent way too long last night trying to get my old Nexus 4's launcher back to something resembling stock after messing around with a launcher clone of Home someone posted on XDA, and I regret every minute of it. Some interfaces are worth tinkering with. This was not one of them, for me at least. Your mileage, as always, may vary, and apparently for ninety-nine cents a whole lot of people are about to find out for themselves.