Microsoft to discontinue Photosynth and several MSN apps including MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Travel for iOS, Android, and Windows in the coming months
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet :
Context & Ripple Effects
Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft will retire Photosynth and the MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Travel apps across iOS, Android, and Windows in the coming months — a pruning pass on a mobile app portfolio that had grown broad rather than strategic. The MSN-branded apps were portal-era content plays ported onto phones, competing in categories where dedicated apps already dominated.
The cull fits a pattern the coverage traces forward: Skype Qik was phased out within months, Xbox Fitness shut down citing content costs, sources reported the Band hardware may be discontinued while its Health service lives on cross-platform, and by 2018 even the Groove Music mobile apps stopped working. Each move keeps the service layer where Microsoft sees durable reach and cuts the standalone app shells around it.
First-order effects
- Users of Photosynth, MSN Health & Fitness, and MSN Travel on iOS, Android, and Windows lose those apps outright, with no replacement named for any of the three.
- Microsoft's MSN brand retreats from native mobile apps entirely, concentrating whatever remains of the franchise on the web portal.
Second-order effects
- Health-and-fitness and travel app rivals face one less free, ad-backed competitor from a major platform holder — but also see that Microsoft's own exit signals how hard those categories are to sustain at scale.
- Windows users get a fresh reminder that first-party Microsoft apps can vanish without migration paths, which pressures loyalty on exactly the platform where app scarcity already hurts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through Qik, Band, and Groove, Microsoft's consumer strategy structurally narrows to a handful of cross-platform services (Office, cloud, messaging) while everything else gets sunsetted — an admission that maintaining parallel app portfolios across three OSes costs more than the engagement returns.
- For the broader industry, it hardens the norm that platform owners treat mobile apps as experiments with explicit kill dates, raising user skepticism toward any first-party app without a clear strategic anchor.
The trend: Microsoft is systematically retiring its peripheral consumer apps to concentrate resources on a small set of cross-platform services, making app sunsets a routine instrument of strategy rather than a sign of failure.