TechCrunch Interviews With Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Phone

Earlier this weekend, TechCrunch reported that Facebook is secretly building its own smartphone. TechCrunch said Facebook is working on the software for the phone, like Apple and other phone makers, and a third party will build the phone. Immediately after the report came, Facebook issued a denial statement on Sunday and said

The story, which originated in Techcrunch, is not accurate. Facebook is not building a phone.

Since then people have been speculating on what the Facebook phone could do and whether it will succeed at all.

Facebook CEO Invites TechCrunch for an Interview

To clear up the air on Facebook Phone, Facebook invited TechCrunch to its headquarters and speak to CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s mobile plans. TechCrunch has published the full transcript of the interview with Mark Zuckerberg and he talks in detail about Facebook’s plan to add the social layer to everything not just web and mobile.

Is Facebook Working on a New OS for SocialPhone?

For those who really want to know whether Facebook is working on Android-like OS for Facebook phone, here is the answer directly from Facebook CEO.

TechCrunch:

So, are you working on a ground-up operating system for mobile phones today?

Mark Zuckerberg:

An Operating System? No.

When you get into the definition of what building a phone is, there are all these different things, which I think is the grey area, where, actually, sometimes even people internally refer to stuff as ‘Facebook phones’.

There’s the Apple approach of really designing all the hardware – I don’t think that they manufacture it themselves, but they probably work very closely with Foxconn – but they do have chip design and all of that in-house, I’ll bet we’ll never do anything like that. That is different from what we do.

And just from the 6 years of experience we’ve had building Facebook, which is a pretty complex system, you can’t just wake up one day and decide you want to do this stuff. Even building a whole operating system is, like years and years of work. So that is what Google does.

And Google has been in a bunch of different places. Nexus One, I think people would say they built that phone a bit more, but the Droid, I don’t think you could consider that is a phone that Google built, but some people would. I think what you’ll find is that all of this stuff that we do, is lighter than all of those things.

I mean, who knows, 10 years down the road, maybe we’ll build our own operating system or something, but who knows. That is more history than we’ve had so far with the company, so it is really hard to predict that far out. But for now, I think, everything is going to be shades of integration, rather than starting from the ground up and building a whole system.

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