Eighteen months ago, Mark Zuckerberg was not happy with Facebook's mobile strategy. The world's largest social network was offering up a weak product â€" a hybrid app running on HTML5 instead of native apps for iOS and Android â€" essentially ignoring the platform (mobile) that it now deems most important. A change needed to be made, and Zuckerberg now openly admits it.
"We took a bad bet," the Facebook CEO said during last week's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. "Our legacy as a company was building this big website and focusing on being able to develop for the web. So naturally we tried to look at things and see if we could build an HTML5 system for across these different platforms and we just realized pretty quickly that we weren't going to get the quality level that we needed.
"So we took a year and it was painful and we retooled that."
Mobile has become the company's most important focus, the platform that it will use to sign up the site's next billion users. (And probably the billion after that, too.) Since launching native iOS and Android apps last fall, Facebook has taken a mobile first approach both publicly and internally.
The part of the company that was once a black eye is now the center of attention as Facebook advances on its quest to get the entire world not only onto the Internet, but onto the platform. “If you rewind like two years ago, everyone was, like, ‘mobile is coming, mobile is coming, mobile is coming,'" said Mike Vernal, Facebook's director of engineering. "For Facebook and specifically our developers, for the past year-plus we’ve just been focused on, ‘Ok, it’s just about mobile, how can we help mobile developers?'"
It's no secret that mobile users are important to the company. Of the 699 million daily active users who logged onto the site in June, more than two-thirds did so from a mobile device. Mobile ads (which didn't even exist a year ago) made up 41% of the company's total ad revenue in Q2, more than $655 million. Mobile users spend one in every five minutes online using Facebook; web users spend one in every seven minutes, Zuckerberg said.
 Graph: Facebook Q2 Earnings Report
With such a major part of the company reliant on mobile, it's interesting to think how little attention was spent on building a great mobile offering even 18 months ago. Facebook had fewer than 20 people on their core mobile team in early 2012, and changes to the mobile app came every three to six months â€" compared to the desktop version, which was updated twice per day, said Cory Ondrejka, Facebook's VP of mobile engineering.
Changes to the social network were built for the web, and the Facebook mobile team was responsible for identifying the changes, and then finding a way to implement them into the app. Among the major issues with the company's hybrid app was its speed and stability (it was slow and often crashed, Ondrejka said). With a company full of web developers, building for web first was the natural order of things even if Facebook wanted to portray itself as a mobile-focused company. "They had a rough time 18 months ago," said Brian Blau, research director for consumer technology at research firm Gartner. "What they said they were doing [on mobile] and what they were actually doing was two different things."
"Since then, I think that they've really turned a corner."
When Facebook decided to revamp its mobile approach last summer, Zuckerberg refocused the company, giving each team mobile engineers and developers so that updates and new features could be built with the mobile experience in mind. "[Mark] said, 'You know, we need to think about maybe putting mobile first and being a mobile-first company,'" Facebook Vice President of Business and Marketing Partnerships David Fischer told Fortune's Adam Lashinsky in February.
"We realigned the company around, so everybody was responsible for mobile." Facebook has since put hundreds of engineers through week-long iOS and Android classes on campus, Ondrejka said, and updates to the native apps come each month instead of three to four times a year.
Facebook has also unveiled a number of core features on mobile first, including the News Feed's major redesign that came to the web in March, and Chat Heads, a feature taken from Facebook Home that has since been rolled out on the web. Last week's announcement that Facebook videos will now autoplay on mobile devices is leading many to believe that mobile video ads are coming soon, too.
Features are rolled out on web or mobile depending on the use case, Ondrejka said. For example, the ability to add photos to Facebook comments is a mobile feature because it makes more sense that people would snap candid photos while on their phones, not while behind a desktop screen.
This company-wide transition doesn't mean that Facebook's mobile strategy is perfect. The social network's biggest feature of the year, Graph Search, still isn't on mobile even though it was announced in January, and Facebook's home screen software, Home, has been deemed a relative flop. (The first phone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed, the HTC First, was reportedly discontinued by AT&T this summer.) "Facebook Home has been an abysmal failure," Blau said. "Maybe they had some really great ideas there, but they just didn't deliver it in the right package or the right way."
Home provides an example of how Facebook's company strategy â€" "Move fast and break things" â€" doesn't always work out. (Zuckerberg even admits that moving fast gets Facebook "into tons of trouble.") Facebook is a company that likes to take risks, Blau said, but if done too regularly or without proper payoffs, flounders like Home could create trust problems with users.
"Having that innovative strategy isn't a bad thing," he said. "I think it's just how you go about managing it. That's the real key here. And that's probably what they can improve upon."
Facebook is hoping to revitalize Home, which is only available to Android users, by bringing other social content, including Instagram alerts, to users' home screens in the near future, Zuckerberg said last week.
So what's the next phase of Facebook's mobile march? For starters, building a mobile app to accommodate the site's next billion users will require more creativity in terms of development. In a white paper released Monday about the company's newest philanthropic venture, Internet.org, Facebook outlined the need for Internet companies to become more efficient in delivering data and building mobile apps that use less data and power. Facebook already has a data-friendly app known as Facebook for Every Phone, and it has more than 100 million users, according to the white paper.
Facebook is putting significant time into research for the company's future mobile offerings. The social network recently sent a team of employees to the Philippines to get a first-hand look at how the app is being used abroad. In one research exercise, each team member was sent into a local marketplace with less than $50 to purchase the best phone they could find for the money. The hope is to better understand what types of devices people are using to visit Facebook, says Ondrejka.
Facebook has since completed similar exercises in Africa, and will most likely do something similar in Latin America, according to a company spokesperson.
Around Facebook's Menlo Park campus, engineers test and build updates on old versions of Android to simulate how the app will work in areas where cell technology is lagging behind.
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Facebook's new iOS 7 app launched on Wednesday.
Facebook has spent the last year and a half working to redefine the way people think about its product. The new approach has worked for stockholders. A year ago, Facebook's stock price ($FB) was hovering around $22 per share. As of Thursday, it was creeping up on $46.
Desktop won't go away â€" it's too important to how the company scales. But mobile is how Facebook hopes to continue its growth over the next decade, and true to Facebook form, the company isn't advancing timidly. "We've focused on doing what we think are the right things," Zuckerberg said at TechCrunch Disrupt. "We're growing, we're connecting more folks, people are engaging more, sharing more content. [It's] all the stuff that we come in and get excited about every day."
What do you think about Facebook's mobile offerings? Tell us in the comments below.
Image: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
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