7 years later, Android 11 brings a Facebook Phone feature to everyone: A brief history of chat heads

Remember the Facebook Phone? If you’re a tech blogger, maybe. Anyone else? Probably not. Its real name was the HTC First, and it was an Android smartphone announced as part of a press event held by Facebook in April 2013. Here’s a little more history: One of its headline features, chat heads, has now made its way into the world’s most popular mobile operating system — seven years later.

It goes without saying that the “Facebook Phone” is completely irrelevant to most every smartphone buyer today. The “Facebook Phone” doesn’t exist in 2020, so we know how the story ended with this Facebook-HTC partnership to make Android phones. Badly.

But when the HTC First launched, it wasn’t just about physical smartphone units. No, it was also the first phone to come with the Facebook-intergrated skin for Android phones pre-installed. It was a rethought people-centric way of interacting with our phones, and pretty much every reviewer derided it.

But there was feature part of Facebook Home that reviewers praised. Take a guess. Here’s The Verge:

Although Chat Heads are great, the Home experience itself simplifies app management to a fault. I fully recognize that most people don’t give their homescreens much thought and don’t invest much time in customization, so it’s entirely possible that I’m off the mark and there’s enough functionality here for casual smartphone users — but I don’t think I am.

And TechCrunch:

My favorite feature of Home on the First was Chat Heads, the chat multi-tasking system. Incoming Facebook Messages and SMS appear as little bubbles of friends’ faces that persistently float over the top of whatever app you’re using as you navigate around the phone.

Yes, pretty much everyone agreed that these chat heads, as Facebook called them, were a novel and useful way of keeping relationships easy to access and front-and-center. Remember, this was a time before phones became as fluid and dynamic as they are today — pointing, surfacing, and recommending apps and actions to you all the time — so digging to find that one app and conversation could be a bit of chore.