So AT&T quietly did the thing I figured they'd have to do eventually: the HTC First, the so-called "Facebook phone," got marked down from $99.99 to ninety-nine cents this week. A penny under a hundred bucks to a hundred pennies. Less than a month after launch. That's not a price cut, thats a fire sale with the fire still going.
I wrote about Facebook Home back when it came out in April and said I didnt think a launcher was going to save a phone nobody was asking for, and I hate being right about stuff like this because it means somewhere a product manager is having a genuinely bad week. The First wasnt even a bad phone on paper - mid-range specs, fine for the money, nothing offensive. The problem was always Home itself, the Facebook-first Android skin that replaces your homescreen with Cover Feed, this big photo-and-status stream that assumes what you want most from your phone is more Facebook, all the time, on top of everything else you're doing.
Turns out that's not actually what people want! Who knew. I downloaded Home onto my old Galaxy Nexus the week it hit Google Play just to poke at it, and I gave up on it within about two days. Not because it was broken, it worked fine, but because I dont want my lockscreen to be a slideshow of my cousins brunch photos. I want my lockscreen to tell me the time and maybe whether I have a text. Cover Feed felt like Facebook trying to make itself the operating system, and I already have an operating system, thanks.
The bigger thing here, and this is the part that actually interests me more than one weird AT&T phone, is what it says about the whole "put Facebook everywhere" strategy heading into their I/O-season push this year. Home was supposed to be step one of something bigger, this idea that Facebook could sit underneath Android the way Android sits underneath apps. A layer you cant get away from. And the market's answer, one month in, is apparently "no thanks, and also please take this phone off our hands for less than a candy bar costs." I don't think this kills Facebook's ambitions on mobile, they've got too much money and too many engineers for one bad launch to matter long-term. But it's a pretty clean data point that "more Facebook, all the time" isnt automatically a feature.
(Small tangent: I also saw that Tesla posted an actual profit this week, first one ever, something like eleven million bucks for the quarter. Wild to think about a car company - a car company - being the more surprising success story in the same seven days as a phone flop from two companies that should absolutely know how phones work by now. I dont have a ton to say about Tesla specifically other than it's nice to see, but it made the HTC First thing feel even more like a punchline by comparison.)
Anyway. If you want a decent Android phone for less than the price of a coffee and dont mind a Facebook launcher you can just... not use, apparently now's your moment. I wont be the one buying it, but I wont pretend I'm surprised somebody has to.
One last thing, unrelated but stuck in my head today: my RSS reader situation is still a mess since Google Reader announced it's shutting down in July, and I keep meaning to actually commit to a replacement instead of just complaining about it here. Feedly's fine I guess. I miss the old thing already and it's not even gone yet.