Facebook Moments App for Private Sharing of Photos, Videos to Be Discontinued on February 25

Facebook Moments, the standalone app for Android and iOS that was aimed to let users privately share their photos and videos, will be discontinued on February 25. The social networking giant on Thursday publicly announced the discontinuation of the Moments app. Also, a workaround to export all the Moments shared through the dedicated app has been provided. Facebook notably launched the Moments app back in 2015 as a new solution to help users share their photos and videos in private space using facial recognition. The app in 2016 gained a feature to allow sharing of private albums through Web links.

"We are sad to announce that we will be ending support for Moments, and after February 25, the app will no longer be available," Facebook said in the formal announcement posted on the Moments page on Thursday.

To help users continue to access their Moments, Facebook has provided two export options. There is a native Moments webpage from where you can export your Moments. From here, you can either download them to your device, or create private albums on your Facebook profile. The option to download your photos and videos available on the Moments webpage will notably be available until May.

As CNET reports, Facebook has started informing users of the discontinuation through an email. The Moments app also shows an alert to announce the shutdown. Starting next week, users who have used the Moments app in the last one year will get a notification about the departure through the regular Facebook app.

Facebook reportedly considered the discontinuation of the Moments app due to its less interest among users. However, CNet's Richard Nieva underlines that as per the data provided by app analytics firm Sensor Tower, the Moments app has been installed by 87 million users on the App Store and Google Play since its launch back in June 2015. The app also hit the milestone of 10.7 million downloads in June 2016, that declined to 150,000 downloads last month, according to Sensor Tower.

Some of the moves that helped push the downloads of the Moments app include the shutdown of the photo syncing feature from Facebook's mobile app and the ability to share videos, which wasn't available initially. Facebook had also reportedly threatened some users to download the Moments app to retain their private albums.

In September 2016, Facebook also upgraded the Moments app by adding the option to share private albums through Web links. The company also added support for full-resolution photos.