Failed Photo Sharing App, Facebook Moments to be Shutdown in February

Social media giant, Facebook has announced that it will shut down its photo-sharing platform, Moments come February 15.

Launched in 2015, Moments lets you share pictures that are stored on your phone with your Facebook friends without actually uploading the photos to the network itself. That way, users get to share your photos with the friends who are in them, just as you can get photos that you’re in.

But Facebook has decided to end support for the app mainly because there aren’t not enough people using the app.

“We’re ending support for the Moments app, which we originally launched as a place for people to save their photos,” said in a statement.

Rushabh Doshi, Moments director of product management

“We know the photos people share are important to them so we will continue offering ways to save memories within the Facebook app.”

To that effect, Facebook has begun informing users of the shutdown through email, as well as an alert on the Moments app. Also, from next week, people who have used the Moments app recently will get a notification when they open the main Facebook app.

The platform has also made a provision for Moment users to retrieve their photos from the app. Starting from yesterday, users are now able to access a website version of the Moments app. Upon access, users would be able to export their photos to a private album on their Facebook account or download them either to their computers or phones. This provision would be available only until May.

Facebook Has a Problem

The decision to shutdown the Moments app further points to the inability of Facebook to get users to embrace services from its standalone apps.

In recent times Facebook has shutdown various apps beyond its core offerings due to low usage. These includes; Paper, its news-reading app; Poke, its Snapchat Clone; Moves, its fitness tracker; Hello, its caller ID tool and Rooms, an anonymous chatting app.

And with the shutdown of Moments, it’s not clear if Facebook would be able to convince users to try new apps in the future. Especially since most of their activity on Facebook involves either the main app or Messenger.