Apps do come and go, and Facebook knows that all too well now that it decided to ditch two unsuccessful apps in its site: Poke and Camera. The two apps were made available in the App Store but never released on Android.
Poke app, for one, was around since 2004 and eventually launched on mobile in 2012. It was seen as a contender to Snapchat, a popular messaging app, with a similar self-destruct timer.
"With the Poke app, you can poke or send a message, photo, or video to Facebook friends to share what you're up to in a lightweight way. You can poke an individual friend or several at once. Each message expires after a specific time you've set, either 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds. When time runs out, the message disappears from the app," Facebook says in a blog post.
Unfortunately, Poke didn't even reach the tip of Snapchat's success that continued to be very popular until this day, except for the recent controversy with the Federal Trade Commission regarding its handling of privacy and security. Research says even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself once called Poke "more of a joke," created as a "hackathon thing" then abandoned eventually.
On the other hand, around longer than Poke is the Camera app, an emulation of Instagram, the very popular and creative photo-sharing app now also acquired by Facebook. It allowed for multiple photo uploads and filtering. Facebook launched it in May 2012, following the purchase of Instagram. It was first released as a standalone app, till its nice aspects were included slowly into the main app of Facebook, hence rendering the downloadable Camera app useless.
On Friday though, an unnamed spokeswoman of Facebook confirms that the company got rid of the two apps from the App Store but didn't announce it on public, seen as a move most Internet companies do when they let go of some products.
"Neither app has been updated in some time, and we've decided to officially end support by removing them from the app store," a Facebook spokeswoman said.
Research suggests that Facebook might have pulled out the two apps -- Poke and Camera -- to make way for new apps or software being created under its Creative Labs, such as the Paper, which looks like a magazine that displays posts, photos and articles in a clean but image-heavy style and is now being received well by its users.
