Perhaps they shouldn't have bailed on making phones. Android phone arena is still very messy and they could just...have good hardware and a slick skin on Android and probably make a go of it.

I know I'm armchairing the devil so to speak but I think this would have been a good long term play for them, but I imagine their expertise at the time was antithetical to hardware.

Meta/Microsoft/Amazon all did not want to plow the billions of dollars and years it takes to develop hardware that can compete with iPhone and Android.

They bet that they did not need to, but unfortunately for Meta, looks like they should have.

Not even compete with Android, just build a better Android phone, and sell it near cost (or at cost). Would have given them troves of data I'm sure.

The muscle is around contract negotiation with the carriers and co-opting those partnerships, but they had the money to burn on this.

Who in their right mind would buy a Facebook phone, considering the neverending security issues, data leaks and total disregard for user privacy?

7-10 years ago it would have sold. Especially if they marketed is as "use FB as your address book".

I would've loved a basic FB integrated tablet for my parents. Something that had easy video chat for the kids. This would have worked really well with the friend graph. My options both on Android and iOS leave a lot to be desired.

The Meta Portal is exactly what you want. The hardware is actually pretty nice.

I mean people buy google phones, it can't get a lot worse than them. And they aren't bad phones either.

Imo at the end of the day people don't give two shits about privacy, convenience is king

The same people that still use Facebook. Which is to say, we could probably find a couple of billion people who couldn't give two rats asses about all that, and just want to respond to Aunt Nancy's political rants[1] in a space where everyone can see.

[1] Or watch Feel Good Videos ABOUT People Spontaneously HELPING Poor ANIMALS Trapped In A PREDICAMENT [2].

[2] That the people in question may or may not have put them into.

I genuinely despise the people that make [1][2] for monetisation purposes and ad dumping. Intentionally torturing and starving small animals for likes. Fuck.

It would tell if it was like one plus. Premium phone at a discount. One plus has horrendous privacy issues

They all DID plow billions of dollars into phone efforts, but they just couldn't muscle their way into a competitive position

They could all definitely manufacture Android devices and hold some Android sub-market share, but that business isn't interesting to them. They wanted to control a platform, and when it was clear that wasn't going to happen (after spending many billions), they gave up.

Clearly they needed to plow more billions and years. They are competing with company that has spent a decade+ developing a retail store presence as well as iterating over and over on their product.

But Microsoft and Google and Meta were not interested in “in person support” or business that does not scale, and part of the price they pay for that is to be gimped by Apple at a moments notice and watch your market cap dive.

I think Google showed with Windows Phone that they were very much willing to sacrifice a few users of their huge platforms in order to sabotage any competitor platforms entirely (e.g. refusing them access to the YouTube API, and refusing to develop a YT app for WP). I think that once Amazon and MS stopped developping their phone OSs, the message was well and truly sent: you either make a Google phone, or you try to make a popular phone without easy access to YouTube and GMail and Google Maps (obviously, Apple was already too big by the time Android really got going for Google to have any chance of hurting Apple more than themselves with this same strategy).