Depends on the OS -- Jellybean is different from Ice Cream Sandwich is different from Gingerbread is different from...
If you want something like this on all Android phones, it's more than just making an app to put in the Google Play store -- it's understanding the ins and outs of the different nuances of each OS...
There is a big gap between the phones on Gingerbread (Android API level 10) and post Ice Cream Sandwich (Android API level 15). Supporting older versions requires a lot of support libraries which themselves have some bugs. I kind of have a feeling that pre-ICS level phones is going to be in someways be like supporting IE6 down the road, so Facebook is just avoiding that.
It's also definitely not a 'handful' of phones. As of right now 55% of users are on the post-ICS versions. (http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html). The ecosystem has somewhat consolidated post ICS as well. There are now fewer phones each with more users which makes testing easier.
So, your definition of lack of imagination is that instead of taking one of the two obvious routes, they instead are doing something different and non-obvious (I don't recall anybody predicting this is what they would do) that gets them much greater bang-for-the-buck than either of the two obvious answers could have gotten, essentially accomplishing all the goals they care about for a fraction of the price?
You and I have very different ideas about what "imagination" looks like.
This solution seems to give them most of the benefits of having their own hardware or OS, without any of the downsides like slow iteration or requiring people to switch phones/carriers.
Android is architected to allow for "deeply intrusive" modifications to the standard Android homescreen. Manufacturers have already done this, as have independent developers like Go Launcher.
As an Android developer, I am happy that I am not seeing yet another Android fork like Kindle Fire, Nook, various Chinese forks etc. I prefer more HTC/Facebook people coming to Play as opposed to setting up yet another app store. If Facebook makes it easy to integrate Intents and such with this (they had some problems in the past), I am sure Android developers will be happy to integrate more with the Facebook API.
I think this is a smart move by Facebook. They started with problems on mobile - junky HTML5 apps which did not integrate well, but as time has gone on they have been making better decisions and doing smarter things. This is just one more good move on their part.
They didn't go the hardware route since it is a lot of work.
They didn't go the route of forking Android, since then they would have to partner with hardware manufacturers and that is a lot of work
So what do they build instead? A deeply intrusive fork of their App that is not even going to be available on all Androids!
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