So apparently AT&T yanked the HTC First off store shelves. I saw this bouncing around a couple of tech sites over the long weekend and had to double check the date because it genuinely feels like the phone just came out. And it basically did — this thing launched April 12th. Two months. That's the whole lifespan, more or less, from "here's the future of Facebook on Android" to quietly removed from the display case at your local AT&T store.
If you missed the whole saga: the HTC First was the "Facebook phone," except it wasn't really a Facebook phone, it was a totally normal mid-range HTC Android phone with a launcher called Facebook Home bolted on top. Home replaced your lock screen and home screen with a big scrolling feed of Facebook photos and status updates, with "Chat Heads" (little circular avatars) popping up over everything when someone messaged you. Facebook made a huge deal out of the launch event back in April, Zuckerberg up on stage talking about how phones should be about people, not apps. I remember watching the liveblog of that thing and thinking the idea wasn't crazy, exactly, but the execution felt like it was solving a problem I didn't have.
The First launched at $99 on a two year contract, which was already a rough price for what amounted to mid-tier specs with a paint job on top. Within about three weeks AT&T dropped it to 99 cents. Ninety nine cents! That's not a promotional discount, that's a store trying to get rid of inventory before it has to write it off. And now, a few weeks after that, it sounds like they've stopped selling it altogether. I haven't seen an actual number on how many units moved, and I doubt we ever will, but "we cut the price by over 99% and it still didn't sell" tells you basically everything.
Here's my honest opinion, and I'll admit I was skeptical from the first demo video: nobody wants their phone's home screen taken over by one single app, no matter how much time they spend in it. I use Facebook plenty, probably more than I'd like to admit, but I don't want it to BE my phone. I want to check it, close it, and get back to whatever I was doing: texting, checking email, whatever. Home flips that around and makes Facebook the default state of the device, and every review I read (and the one demo I played with at a friend's place) had the same complaint: it's neat for about ten minutes and then it's just in the way of you doing anything else.
The bigger story here isn't really about HTC, even though I feel a little bad for them — they've had a genuinely rough stretch and this can't have helped. It's that Facebook tried to own the actual hardware layer of your phone and it flopped, hard, immediately. Home the software is apparently still available as a free download for a handful of other Android phones, and I assume that continues to limp along quietly. But the hardware bet, the idea that people would pick a phone specifically because it ran Facebook's launcher by default, that's dead. Two months dead.
I don't think this kills Facebook's ambitions on mobile generally, to be clear. They're obviously not going anywhere on Android or iOS as an app, and their acquisition of Instagram last year still looks smart every time I open it. But "Facebook as an operating system" was always the weirder, more aggressive idea, and the market answered pretty fast. Ninety nine cents fast.
Anyway. If you bought a First back in April at full price, my condolences, and also, who are you, because I genuinely don't know anyone who did.