Zuckerberg shoots down possibility of Facebook phone for second time

A month after Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the possibility of a Facebook-branded smartphone, saying it wouldn’t make any sense, the social network’s 28-year-old CEO reiterated his reluctance to get into hardware at TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday.

“It’s such a juicy thing for people to say,” Zuckerberg said when asked about the likelihood of a Facebook phone. “That’s why people have wanted to write that, but it’s so clearly the wrong strategy. We’re building this network, we’ll have 950 million users soon. Let’s say we built a phone [and] we could get 10 million people to use it — it doesn’t move the needle for us.

“The strategy that’s different for every other tech company, which is building their own hardware, [is] we’re going in the opposite direction,” Zuckerberg continued. “We want to build a system which is as deeply as possible integrated into every major device people want to use.”