Moments, Facebook's rarely-used, photo-sharing app to shut down next month
What's the story
Facebook has announced that it is shutting down its standalone photo-sharing app, Moments, next month. The rarely-used app, which was brought around four years back, failed to make waves among users and will no longer be available from February 25. The social media giant made the announcement on the official Facebook page of Moments recently. Here's more on this.
Facebook Post
Facebook makes the official announcement
Use
App would organize photos by either time, location or people
The app was introduced in 2015 for people to share pictures with their friends without having to upload them publicly on Facebook. After you install it, it would sort the photos and videos present in your phone by either time, location or the people in the images/clips. After the sorting out, people could share the pictures and videos that were clicked with their kin.
Inactivity
Last post on Moments' Facebook page was of July 2018
Since the time it was launched, 87 million users downloaded the Moments app. However, compared to the overall 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook, it wasn't enough. Also, the Facebook page of Moments had been pretty inactive. You can see that after the shutting down announcement post, the next one is of July 5, 2018, and the other one from May 10, 2016.
Failure
Moments earned less than Rs. 3.5L for Facebook last month
The Moments page had a total of 8 official posts. This makes it evident that there wasn't much development or promotion of the app. A lot of people also called it a clone of Google Photos. Notably, the app's closure would not cost the social media company a lot as Moments earned less than $5,000 (Rs. 3.5 lakh) for the company last month.
Other details
Media reports say failure due to lack of updates
Reportedly, Facebook admitted that it is closing down the app because of less traction. Some media reports pointed out that people would have been interested to use the app had Facebook updated it more frequently. For the iOS version of the app, it was updated only 3 times since September 21017.
Exporting data
Meanwhile, here's how you can retrieve data from the app
Meanwhile, if you have used the app, you can retrieve your data from here: https://bit.ly/2RmBV52. You can either create private albums on your Facebook profile where an album will be created for each moment that only you can see. Or, you can download the pictures on your device. Facebook will email you a link, but you'll have to download them within a few days.