Facebook ambitious plan to take over your smartphone hasn’t panned out, and apparently, the original team behind it has moved on. According to The New York Times’Bits blog, Facebook has disbanded the team that was initially responsible for developing Facebook Home, an Android skin that it released last year, which overhauled a phone to display Facebook photos on its lock screen and provide easy access to chat messages and status updates. Bits doesn’t say that work on Home has necessarily ended for good, but it suggests the chances of it moving forward aren’t very high either.
Facebook has long wanted to be a major part of how you use your smartphone. Now, it looks as if the company has all but abandoned one of its major strategies to do so. The company has disbanded the team of engineers originally assigned to work on Facebook Home, its custom-made mobile software for Android devices, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. Released with much fanfare last year, Home was the result of the social giant’s multi-year effort to more deeply integrate Facebook features into an Android smartphone. After downloading and installing the software, for example, Home made it faster to view Facebook photos and send messages to friends directly from the home screen of the phone without needing to rely on Facebook’s popular mobile app to do so. In effect, the Home software transformed a smartphone into a Facebook phone.
