Reflection point: The flawed assumptions behind the failure of Facebook Home
I’m writing this post as part of my 6-month learning journey as a student at DesignLab’s UX Academy. One of the assignments of this week’s module on research techniques invites us to reflect on the assumptions behind a failure in the business realm. This is my attempt to pin down the flawed assumptions that ultimately led to the quiet demise of Facebook Home.
More than 5 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Home to worldwide audiences with the following declaration of intent:
“Today we’re finally going to talk about that Facebook phone. Or more accurately, we’re going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great social device.”
He was in part referring to the HTC First phone, the first ever (and now defunct) Android device that came pre-installed with Facebook Home. But beyond the launch of HTC First, Zuckerberg had set his sights on a far more encompassing vision of Facebook for mobile, where users can transform their existing Android devices into Facebook phones by simply installing the user interface wrapper that is Facebook Home.
For those of us who, perhaps unsurprisingly, have trouble recalling the exact features of this early mobile venture by Facebook, Steve Kovach does a good job summarising the conceptual gist of the Facebook Home interface:
Facebook Home is an Android app that adds a Facebook wrapper to your phone’s home screen. Instead of the normal app icons, you see Facebook’s Cover Feed, a moving slide show of photos and status updates from your Facebook friends. You can like or comment on Facebook content directly from Cover Feed without opening up the regular Facebook app. Home also hides the rest of your apps in a specially designed menu that sits beneath Cover Feed.
“Chat Heads” were another key component of Facebook Home: Whenever the user of Facebook Home received a Facebook message or a regular text message, a bubble with the Facebook profile picture of the message sender will pop up on his or her phone screen. Upon which, they can choose to respond immediately by tapping on the bubble, or tap and drag it away if they wish to do so later — all without shifting away from the application or task they were occupied with prior to receiving the message.
Cover Feeds and Chat Heads, however, never caught on with Android users. As for the HTC First phone, heavily marketed on the idea that it would ship an all-round Facebook experience right of the box, its price was slashed by more than 99% within a month of its public unveiling. Less than a year after the launch of Facebook Home, Facebook quietly stopped updating the software.
Looking back, the failure of Facebook Home boils down to a handful of flawed assumptions about the wants and needs of smartphone users:
1- Given that Facebook is the most-used app for smartphone users, it will be both convenient and desirable to place Facebook touch points front-and-center of the smartphone user environment.

Zuckerberg’s claim that “the average smartphone user spends about 20 percent of his or her time on Facebook”, and the supposedly self-evident conclusion — namely, that Facebook should override the use of other apps and smartphone functions — derived from this piece of data, forms the first bend in the spiral of flawed assumptions. As pointed out by Steve Kovach in a separate article, while Facebook may indeed be the most-used individual app for smartphone users, when we take a larger view of how the average smartphone user allocates the total time spent on their device, other activities like games and productivity still very much dominate. And since Facebook Home buries other apps and programs under the Cover Feed, requiring the user to press on a separate button in order to access them, as put by Kovach, “Facebook Home is a barrier to the stuff most people want to do on their phones.” This barrier likely served as a disincentive to instalment for smartphone users.
2- Users are willing to cede control of their devices in order to engage more with their social connections on Facebook.
The main assumption underlying the design of the Cover Feed is that smartphone users are willing to relinquish control of their home screens to Facebook algorithms (and eventually advertising), all in order to be able to interact with their social network without unlocking their phones. As noted by one reviewer of Facebook Home in the Play store, this level of ubiquity and integration was “fine for a Facebook addict”, while most smartphone users prefer to keep their Facebook feeds churning within the parameters of the Facebook app and retain the traditional app menu and wallpaper.
