I am talking about jumping to create a family of mobile apps that dominate the data day to day usage of mobile. They lost their chance of owning a mobile OS which they are suffering till now
Yes, that is what I was talking about. They were late creating a mobile presence for Facebook. Then of course, Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquisitions. Definitely good acquisitions, but pretty obvious ones. They luckily had plenty of money at the time to plow into the already successful Insta and WhatsApp mobile apps.
IIRC the Facebook "mobile app" was originally just a glorified webview that was slow and didn't integrate well with the native experience. It took them a couple years to fix most things.
And their UI (mobile and web) still suck for lesser used features to this day. Not the "doesn't look good" kind of suck, but "they forgot to put in the submit button" kind suck.