His strategy is to build Facebook into the existing mobile platforms, at a deep level

Sep 12, 2012 10:11 GMT  ·  By

If there's something that's been more rumored than the mythical Amazon smartphone that was "confirmed" just days of Amazon's big announcement, which wasn't about any phone, it's the Facebook smartphone.

The company is supposedly working on it for years and has gone through several projects and several teams.

But Zuckerberg was quick to pour some cold water on the whole deal by saying that a Facebook phone "doesn't make any sense."

Whether they always believed that or came to believe after several years of trying and failing to build something good is another matter.

"That’s always been the wrong strategy for us," Zuckerberg said in his TechCrunch Disrupt interview. "It’s a juicy thing to say we’re building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us."

He went on to explain that if Facebook were to build a phone, it could get maybe 10, 15 million people to use it. But Facebook has one billion users, it wants and needs to be on any phone, on any platform.

"If we did [build a phone], we could get maybe 10 or 15 million people to use it," he said. "The strategy we have is different from every other tech company that’s building their own hardware system, like Apple. We’re going in the opposite direction."

Just having an app for a platform is not enough, Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be deeply integrated with the OS, like it's already possible on Android and like Apple is now doing with iOS 6, which will come with Facebook integration built-in.

The idea is to get to the contacts, to be a sharing option, to integrate with the camera app and so on. With a mobile Facebook that's built into every part of your phone, you're going to use it a lot more.