From Apple’s uber-popular iPhones to the Windows family of operating systems, there’s no shortage of success stories in the tech industry. However, there are just as many devices and applications that have perished without leaving a trace. Dell’s Alienware Area-51m laptops, for instance, were a colossal letdown due to their lack of upgradability, the very feature that was marketed as their selling point. There was also the Cortana digital assistant, which served little purpose besides annoying a majority of Windows users during its lifetime.

And then there was the HTC First, which failed so miserably that calling it an unsuccessful device would be an understatement. With today marking the eleventh anniversary of the Facebook Phone’s launch, it’s time to recount the hilariously tragic tale of the device.

The HTC First was, in fact, the third Facebook Phone

Yep, even its name was bogus

Our story begins in 2011 when social networking websites were exploding in popularity, and Facebook was at the helm of this revolution. By this point, smartphones had become mainstream, making it possible to contact your friends and family with just the push of a button. Having previously released the HTC Dream, the first-ever smartphone to feature Android, in 2009, HTC decided to pull off an even grander move: integrate Facebook functionalities into its mobile phones. And yes, phones, because the company released two of these devices instead of one.

And so, the HTC ChaCha and Salsa were born. Launched as an AT&T exclusive in the US, the former was an old-school keyboard phone with one weird quirk: it had a Facebook button in the bottom-right corner. This little button allowed users to instantly share pictures on their Facebook wall, view status updates, and perform other Facebook-oriented actions.

The other device, HTC Salsa, was identical to its weirdly named brother, except it had a touchscreen in place of the four-row keyboard. Software-wise, both phones came with the Facebook app pre-installed, which worked well with the dedicated button. Despite sounding rather gimmicky, these devices were surprisingly competent. Emboldened by their success, HTC took a giant leap of faith when it came to designing the successor to these phones. And boy, did it fail terribly.

Enter, HTC "Facebook Phone" First

Bless the noble soul who decided against naming it HTC Buffy

Within months, rumors had started popping up that HTC and Facebook were gearing up for an even bigger collaboration, one that would result in a special version of Android centered around social networking. The device in question also went through numerous codenames; initially, it was named Buffy, before it came to be known as Opera UL and later as Myst.

Finally, it was decided that the device would be called HTC First, and the device made its debut on April 12, 2013. Sadly, its debut was anything but grand, and that's because the Facebook Phone was a failure on both the hardware and software fronts.

The HTC First became the last of its kind

Lame hardware and unremarkable software led the Facebook Phone to an early grave

Specs-wise, the device crammed a 1.4GHz dual-core Krait processor, 16GB storage, and 1 GB memory into a 720p display. While the hardware wasn't the worst on the market, it wasn’t worth all the hype either, especially when the company had debuted the HTC One (M7), one of the best smartphones of 2013, just a month before the Facebook Phone’s release.

Things weren't looking well on the software side of things, either. Instead of featuring a useful button like the ChaCha and Salsa, the HTC First just had a Facebook Home UI on top of Android. Not only was this launcher unimpressive, but you could easily install it on any other device, which rendered the HTC First all but useless.

Within days after its release, it became clear that the HTC First wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. $99 was a huge asking price for the device when you could simply buy a cheaper smartphone with better specs and convert it into a “Facebook Phone” by installing the Facebook Home launcher on it.

The HTC First wasn't even worth 99 cents

Not even a huge price cut could salvage the Facebook Phone

AT&T was the first to realize that the device had flopped big time. The HTC First had barely sold 15,000 copies within a month of its release, and AT&T decided a price cut could improve its sales. Lo and behold, they decided to decrease its price to $0.99, hoping a Facebook phone that’s worth 99 cents would tempt more buyers to purchase the device.

But things never worked out in the Facebook Phone’s favor. As if the lackluster hardware and lame software weren’t bad enough, the price drop failed to attract more buyers. Just a month after its launch, reports started pouring in that AT&T had decided to abandon the device.

And that’s pretty much it. The Facebook Phone’s mangled corpse was quickly and quietly put in the tech graveyard. Smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the previously released HTC One diverted the public’s attention away from the Facebook Phone fiasco. Over time, the very notion of a Facebook Phone lost traction.

HTC still continued to create phones centered around unhinged ideas, such as the Bitcoin phone of 2018. But that's a tale for another time. For now, we can rest easy knowing that no company has a Twitter Phone, or god forbid, an X-phone in the makings.