Facebook has quietly taken its Pinterest competitor Hobbi out behind the barn and shot it.
Launched this February, iOS app Hobbi was promoted as a platform for collecting, organising, and sharing photos of projects you're working on, "whether it's cooking, baking, DIY, arts & crafts, fitness or home decor." So it was basically Pinterest for progress shots.
Users gave Hobbi fairly low ratings at launch, deriding it for being unoriginal and derivative, and it continued to garner disapproval due to requiring users' phone numbers. Now, TechCrunch reports Hobbi's few users have received a push notification telling them the app will shut down on July 10.
This infant app won't be widely missed. Hobbi never really took off, with SensorTower estimating it was only downloaded around 7,000 times in the U.S.
Hobbi's performance initially seems like a disappointing result for Facebook's New Product Experimentation Team. However, the development group's actual stated purpose is to "try different ideas by creating small, focused apps in order to see whether people find certain features useful or engaging."
As such, NPE Team is targeted more toward learning and market research than creating viable, successful apps, with numerous shut downs anticipated.
"[U]nlike Facebook’s family of apps, NPE Team apps will change very rapidly and will be shut down if we learn that they’re not useful to people," NPE Team wrote last year. "We expect many failures."
Hobbi isn't the first app NPE Team has thrown against the wall to see if it sticks. Previous releases include meme-making app Whale, party DJ app AUX, and anonymous chat app Bump. Of these, only Whale is currently available in the U.S.
Topics Apps & Software Facebook Pinterest
