Officially, Facebook representatives have never announced the development of their own smartphone. But this did not prevent experts and ordinary consumers from waiting for its release and wondering what the gadget would be like, what prospects await it, and when exactly it will appear on sale. Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that there will be no "smart phone" from Facebook at all sounded like a bolt from the blue to many.
The founder of the popular social network denied existing rumors on July 27, 2012, when he commented on the company's quarterly financial report. According to Zuckerberg, creating a branded smartphone doesn't make any sense. Indeed, even without this, there are Facebook applications for almost all types of mobile devices with any operating system. According to statistics, mobile versions of the site are used by about 20% of all visitors to the social network, and this number is increasing every day. Therefore, it would be more expedient to direct efforts towards the maximum possible integration of Facebook services with existing and popular mobile technologies. First of all - with IOS 6 from Apple.
However, such statements do not mean at all that Bloomberg and DigiTimes were basing their reports on the development of the Facebook phone on deliberately false information. It is likely that Facebook, together with HTC, really intended to release a completely branded smartphone in addition to the HTC ChaCha and SalSa models developed for the social network, and abandoned this intention only recently, in light of the current market situation.
To successfully compete with Samsung and Apple, you need not only to create a worthy original product, but also to have all the “permissive” documents in your hands - patents, licenses, and so on. After all, the struggle for the end consumer between the sales leaders is being waged not only in the shop windows, but also in the courtrooms. Even weak competition from Nokia Lumia has led to litigation with Google in the European Competition Committee. And recently, the "rules of the game" have become even tougher.
Since summer 2012, Google. Inc has changed the terms of use of its Android OS on third-party devices. Changes to the operating system can now only be made after Google approves them. The smartphone from Facebook was just planned to be released based on a heavily modified version of Android. To agree on the necessary changes, Zuckerberg's company would have to declassify a number of important information, which is unacceptable in the competition - the Google+ social network and the Google Talk messenger are direct rivals of Facebook in the struggle for the Internet audience.
It is also worth considering the very unpleasant results of Facebook's IPO, as a result of which the company suffered significant losses. And its further prospects are not yet very bright either. Share prices continue to decline. Some advertisers doubt the effectiveness of the ads posted on the social network, delete their pages and demand a refund, assuring that the clicks on the links are not made by real users, but by bots. By the way, according to the calculations of the Facebook company itself, published on August 2, 2012, in its open spaces there is one fake user for every 10 real users. Skeptics claim that there are many more “fake” accounts. Finally, on the same day - August 2, 2012 - it became known that three more top managers left Facebook at once (three key employees left the company even earlier).
Apparently Zuckerberg is not up to new projects now - he would keep the existing ones.
