Editors' pick: Originally published July 1.
Here's a fact that often gets overlooked due to the enormous success of Facebook's (FB) core service, as well as Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp: A large percentage of the apps and services Facebook launches wind up being either modest success or complete duds.
A look at the social networking giant's current iOS and Android app lineups makes this clear. In addition to the core Facebook app and Messenger, there are products such as Hello, an Android dialer app that (according to Google's data) has seen less less than 500,000 downloads; Strobe, a sparsely-used app for sending GIFs via Messenger; and Facebook at Work, an enterprise social networking solution that has seen only moderate uptake to date.
Not included are a slew of previously-launched apps that have been discontinued. This group includes two would-be Snapchat rivals known as Poke and Slingshot, a pseudonym-based discussion forum app called Rooms, and (perhaps most notably) Home, a Facebook-filled Android home screen replacement that was launched to much fanfare in 2013, but soon fell flat amid a deluge of bad reviews.
Now set to join the ranks of shuttered Facebook apps is Paper, a reader app that (like many others) sought to compete with the popular Flipboard. Paper received great reviews when it launched in the summer of 2014 -- The Verge proclaimed it to be "the best Facebook app ever" -- but downloads didn't follow. And with Facebook having quietly shut down the Creative Labs unit responsible for Paper (among other apps) in late 2015, the app has now gone the way of the dodo.
The failure of these apps isn't anything for Facebook investors to be too worried about. On one hand, there would've been a lot of strategic value to creating a successful Snapchat rival, or in developing a popular Android home screen replacement that gave Facebook (rather than Google) control over much of the Android user experience.
