Facebook gives up on Poke and Camera apps
Facebook has one important app that people like/need to use; it's called Facebook. It's something they should be proud of, a useful way to check your feed and post media from the comfort of your palm. Then one day Facebook saw it had new competitors like Snapchat and Instagram. It decided the best way to deal with these competitors was to put out pale imitations of those apps on their own. Thus Poke and Camera were born.
Sadly for Facebook the apps didn't take off the way that they expected, and like all employees who don't meet their quotas, Poke and Camera have received their pink slips. The apps were recently pulled off of the iTunes store with no public notice. In a comment to The Daily Dot Facebook confirmed these apps have been discontinued.
I can confirm that Poke and Camera are no longer available to download in the App Store.
Since their launch in 2012, we've incorporated elements of each app into the Facebook for iOS and Android apps, including the photo upload flow used today. Neither app has been updated in some time and we've decided to officially end support by removing them from the app store.
The death of Camera in particular makes sense considering Facebook's billion-dollar purchase of Instagram in 2012. Why keep the weak clone alive when you've already got the real thing? Facebook made a much larger offer to buy Snapchat in 2013, ponying up a reported $3 billion dollars for the secret sharing app. Ultimately Snapchat declined to join the Facebook family.
Facebook's Paper news feed reader app is still available for download in the app store.
