The world’s largest social network, Facebook which prides 2.2 billion users has announced its intention to shut down three of its apps for failing to meet with projected expectations. The apps: Moves, Hello, and TBH had failed to gain traction and will cease to exist in the coming weeks, Facebook disclosed in a press release yesterday. Moves, Hello and TBH will be collapsed at disparate times and Facebook says it will delete all user data on the different apps within 90 days.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook Hello app which suffers the lowest number of users has a total download of 570,000, TBH app with 6.4 million while Facebook Moves has about 13 million total installations. But these figures lack comparison with the billions of users Facebook is enjoying across other of its owned apps: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. The three apps Facebook will be shutting down are areas the company had explored over the years to introduce new ideas in the social network.
Facebook Moves
Facebook acquired fitness and tracking Moves four years ago when the company was interested in exploring how users might want to share their fitness data and track fitness progress using Facebook social graphs. As at the time of the acquisition, Moves had over four million downloads and Facebook planned to take the direct role of initiating a social fitness life but people seemed not to be interested in making their fitness social, perhaps Facebook approach lacks the excitement that people want. Facebook Moves which is currently languishing at 616 ranking in fitness category has not been updated for more than a year now. Facebook says the app will be depreciated in the coming weeks.
Image: Facebook Hello
Facebook Hello
Hello was introduced by Facebook in 2015 as part of its strategy to build wider communication services, specifically for users in emerging markets. The app which was only available on Android platform worked in Nigeria, the US, and Brazil. It is very similar to TrueCaller: users are able to link their Facebook accounts to a dialer which pulls callers information using Facebook identity. The app was removed from the Android store last week Tuesday, ranking 509 and Facebook says it will depreciate it with the API on July 31.
Facebook TBH
TBH app was introduced specifically for teens, high school students as an anonymous compliment app. Facebook got the app through acquisition in October 2017. The company was actually young and rarely ubiquitous when Facebook acquired it; barely two months after it was founded. Facebook has given no date it plans to shut down TBH app which is still live at the moment and ranked 205 in social networking.
Facebook is also going to kill other unpopular apps that have failed to progress including APIs that are no longer important. These include Facebook Lifestage; its clone of Snapchat, Group app, and the personal assistant app; M. Facebook says several irrelevant APIs would be going down alongside the apps did not reveal dates.
