Sure, Facebook Home has been flooded with one-star reviews on Google Play and its first flagship phone, the HTC First, will likely go down as one of 2013’s biggest bombs. That doesn’t mean Facebook plans to abandon Home anytime soon, however, and AllThingsD reports that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Wednesday defended the company’s first attempt at creating a Facebook-centric overlay of the Android home screen.
Speaking at the D: All Things Digital conference, Sandberg said that the company considers the current version of Home “a very early version” of where it wants to take the software going forward and said that while the company “would love” to have put out a first version of Home that got everything right, such instant success is rare. Sandberg explained that the goal now is to expand upon features that users like such as Cover Feed and Chat Heads while retooling features that have proven less popular.
“I think it will be a long road,” Sandberg said of Home’s prospects for success. “[The smartphone is] an incredibly powerful device and social device. We believe that the phone will get reorganized around people — Home is the first iteration of that.”
