AT&T revealed on Tuesday that they will soon dump the newly launched Facebook phone HTC First due to very low sales rates and negative reviews. The failure that the Facebook Home app has registered indicates that the social network has to use a different approach to get users to interact outside Facebook, the Guardian reports.
The US network, AT&T, has joyfully cooperated with Facebook to enable the social network to expand its services outside the virtual world, but it was all to no avail. Customers showed no signs of interest towards HTC’s First phone and very few handsets were sold since their launching last month. Low sales rates remained unchanged even after the company dropped the price of the phone from $99 to only 99 cents. Given customers’ lack of interest, the US network is getting ready to abandon the phone and direct its attention towards more lucrative products.
“Facebook Home”, the app that was purposefully designed to turn every Android phone into a Facebook phone, isn’t doing much better, either. The program has barely registered 1 million downloads on Google’s Play Store and users who have installed it on their phones have been terribly disappointed, judging by the negative reviews they have provided. The majority of the people have rated “Facebook Home” as a one-star product, whereas only 17% have offered a five-star review.
Although Facebook avoids any interaction with the media, close sources claim that executives are preoccupied to find a good response to the crisis that has been affecting the company in the past months. “Facebook Home” app was meant to be the social network’s one-way ticket to the smartphone market without producing its own handset, but previous and current efforts have failed lamentably.
Analysts, on the other hand, remain optimistic in spite of the negative reports. They don’t reject the idea of a Facebook app entirely, but suggest the social network to use a different approach to attract users. Windsor, for instance, describes “Facebook Home” as clumsily built and advises the network to use a “less invasive, more intuitive and above all, more fun” strategy.
