Everybody seems to be on an acquiring spree today. Facebook has confirmed that it will acquire Snaptu, an Israel based app development firm. While everyone tries to make apps for smartphones, Snaptu took the high road and went on creating apps for feature phones. And the end result ?? Success ! The app works on more than 2,500 devices, and if you were wondering, its the same Java based Facebook for Feature Phones app that came out in January. Snaptu built it, and Facebook even tied up with 14 carriers to give free data access through it. Snaptu’s own app does a lot more than Facebook though. You get Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa, RSS feeds, weather and news on a plain Java phone with no app store.
Nobody is talking money officially, but Israeli papers TheMarker and Calcalist put the deal at around $60 to $70 million, while some reports say its closer to $40 million. The Snaptu guys say on their blog that joining Facebook was “the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development”. The deal should close in a few weeks, and the Tel Aviv development office reportedly stays put instead of everyone getting shipped off to Palo Alto.
Snaptu says its whole point since 2007 was the 95 percent of mobile users who dont have a smartphone. Good news for the rest of us then. Stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: techcrunch.com, intomobile.com, allaboutsymbian.com, vccafe.com, haaretz.com.
