So AT&T quietly slashed the price on the HTC First down to 99 cents this week, three weeks after it launched at a hundred bucks. I saw it on my lunch break Wednesday and actually laughed out loud in the break room, which got me a weird look from Dave in accounting.
Quick recap for anyone who wasnt paying attention in April: the HTC First was the "Facebook phone." Not a phone Facebook built, exactly, but an Android handset with Facebook Home baked in as the default experience, so instead of a normal home screen you got a scrolling feed of your friends updates, Chat Heads popping up over everything, Cover Feed as your lock screen, a bunch of names some product manager clearly loved. It came out April 12th at $99.99 on a two year contract. Now its a buck.
Ill be honest, I never wanted this thing and I said so back when it was announced. My problem was never that the idea was crazy on its face. Its that Facebook wanted to sit between me and my phone at the operating system level, deciding what I see first every single time I pick it up, and thats a level of access I dont extend to a company whose entire business model is knowing more about me than I know about myself. I use Facebook. I dont trust Facebook. I realize plenty of us just live with that contradiction now and dont think about it much.
The bigger issue, and I think this is the real story buried under the price cut headline, is that Home never solved a problem anybody actually had. Your phones home screen already gets you to your stuff quickly. Replacing it with a feed you have to swipe through to find your camera app solves the problem backwards. I put the Home launcher on my own Nexus for about four days in April just to see, and I switched back to Nova Launcher before the week was out. Not because it was buggy, it mostly wasnt. I switched because I kept missing text messages buried under baby photos from a cousin Ive maybe spoken to twice since high school.
None of this means the HTC First is bad hardware, for what its worth. Its a perfectly fine mid range Android phone. 4.3 inch screen, decent camera, nothing embarrassing about the spec sheet. Take Home off it (you can, thankfully, its not mandatory) and its just a normal phone that happened to ship with a marketing gimmick preinstalled. Which might be the saddest part of the whole thing. A phone that was fine on its own got dragged down to a dollar because of software nobody asked for and most people turned off within a week anyway, if the forums I read are any indication.
I keep coming back to how fast this turned around. Ninety nine dollars to ninety nine cents in three weeks isnt a slow fade, thats AT&T and HTC admitting the bet didnt land before the ink on most of the launch reviews had even dried. Compare that to how long carriers kept propping up Windows Phone handsets nobody was buying, years of that, quietly. This one was fast and it was public, and I dont imagine Facebook is thrilled about either part.
I dont think this is the last well hear of Home, though. Its still sitting on the Play Store for other Android phones, and Id bet they keep pushing updates to it through the summer even after the dedicated hardware quietly vanishes from carrier stores by fall. Companies rarely admit a whole strategy failed just because the first device flopped. Usually they just stop talking about the device and let the software part keep breathing in the background, hoping nobody clocks the pivot.
Google I/O is coming up in a couple weeks and honestly Im more curious what Google does with Android in general than I am about anything Facebook related right now. Might be a decent time to remember who actually builds the operating system underneath all of this in the first place.
One more thing, completely unrelated: my RSS reader situation is still a mess since the Reader shutdown news back in March, and I still havent committed to a replacement. Feedly, maybe. Ask me again in June when Im actually forced to decide.