Social media app Facebook shut down its Moments photo app which allows users to privately share photos with friends on February 25.

One of the reasons why the app is going away is its few number of active users since its release in 2015. Moments allows you to share pictures that are stored on your phone with your Facebook friends without actually uploading the photos to the social network itself. The concept, which is similar to Google Photos, was for people to be able to easily swap group photos or vacation pictures more easily.

Confirming the development, Rushabh Doshi, director of product management for Moments said: “We’re ending support for the Moments app, which we originally launched as a place for people to save their photos. We know the photos people share are important to them so we will continue offering ways to save memories within the Facebook app.”

Although Facebook refused to share user numbers, Sensor Tower, a mobile analytics firm, said the app has been installed by 87 million users on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store since the service was first launched. At its peak, the app was downloaded 10.7 million times in June 2016. That declined to about 150,000 downloads last month.
 
Experts believe Facebook is shutting down Moments to enable it focus on bigger challenges facing the company.

In 2018, the social network faced crisis after crisis, from disinformation campaigns to major security breaches.

It is also worthy to note that Facebook launches and shuts down standalone apps all the time. Some other shuttered apps include Paper, Facebook’s slick news-reading app; Poke, its Snapchat Clone; and Rooms, an anonymous chatting app.