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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

>While Facebook was growing on the Web, Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and the world was revolutionized by smartphones after that. Zuckerberg saw the mobile megatrend before many others did, and as early as 2009 there was a Facebook mobile app with explosive growth.

That's not true; Zuckerberg spent a lot of time and resources pursuing HTML5 Facebook app which was meant for all smartphone devices. When he realized HTML5 web app it's not going to work [0] Instagram already emerged and started growing rapidly. That's when he figured out he needs to make native mobile Facebook app and purchase Instagram in order to gain foot in mobile space and in order to eliminate possible competition in social photo industry.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-bigges...

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Ya, I’m not sure why Zuck is getting praise for foresight in mobile.

He fought mobile, and left their mobile czar position open for years.

I believe he’s even explicitly stated he missed mobile.

GP ultimately says exactly the opposite - Zuckerberg may have had different plans for mobile to start with but he reacted swiftly.

How can anyone say he “missed mobile” when he led the biggest mobile play of any software company in the world, leading to a dominant position today? Top analysts like Ben Thomson widely give him credit for it.

If he says he “missed mobile” it’s possibly false humility and actual hubris, or he means something completely different.

I think the OP refers to Facebook waiting really long to offer a mobile app. Many others jumped into the gap (I personally used an app called "Friendly for Facebook").

They were indeed really slow to recognise mobile as a worthwhile platform. So long that it would have jeopardised their position if it hadn't already been pretty much invincible.

They released a dedicated iOS app on the same month the App Store launched (July 2008), about a year after the first iPhone was launched. They had m.facebook.com (dedicated mobile site) in time for the iPhone launch (Remember when Steve Jobs said web apps were the future? I remember!)

Messenger as a standalone app was released in 2011. They bought Instagram pretty much within two years of birth.

The UX of a lot of the mobile products might not have been good - I don’t remember - but all things considered I would say they moved fast on mobile, at both the engineering and strategic levels, and it paid dividends.

My take when he says he "missed mobile" is that he regrets that Facebook doesn't own the platform. Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp are enormously successful apps, but because Apple & Google own the OS, they are vulnerable. Apple's introduction of App Tracking Transparency and the way Facebook have struggled against this show the nature of their postion.

Google bought Android in 2005, the iPhone was released in 2007, and other important companies (Microsoft, BlackBerry, Nokia) were also doing phone plays which would later fail.

Facebook was still in its infancy as an internet company back then and I doubt they would’ve been able to carry out a hardware or OS play without extremely diluting its focus. But sure, if they had done so and succeeded despite the minimal odds they would be in a totally dominant position right now.

"Missed mobile" might be reference to creating a device-oriented FB moat, the infamous HTC Cha Cha from 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_ChaCha

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