Evernote Food apps for iOS and Android to be retired September 30
Evernote to end support for Evernote Food apps — Two years ago, we created Evernote Food to help people chronicle the universal experience of enjoying great food. Food's most popular features were clipping recipes and snapping photos of meals.
Context & Ripple Effects
Evernote Food lasted barely two years as a standalone companion app before support ends on September 30, with its best-used features — recipe clipping and meal photos — folded back into the question of what Evernote actually wants to be. The retirement reads less like an isolated cut than the opening move in a pruning sequence: weeks later Evernote announced it would kill Skitch on Android, iOS, and Windows in January, and by February it shut down Market, its e-commerce experiment entirely.
The timing also lands mid-wave across the industry: Microsoft had just months earlier moved to discontinue Photosynth and several MSN mobile apps, suggesting 2015 was a broad reckoning for big-platform companies carrying too many thin, single-purpose apps on iOS and Android.
First-order effects
- Evernote Food users on iOS and Android lose their dedicated recipe-clipping and food-photography apps on September 30, forcing migration back to Evernote's core app or to competing recipe tools.
- Evernote itself sheds maintenance burden for a niche vertical app whose usage never justified standalone investment.
Second-order effects
- Dedicated recipe and food-journaling apps become natural landing spots for displaced Evernote Food users, handing rivals in that category an acquisition window.
- Each Evernote cut raises the perceived risk of building workflows inside its peripheral products — a signal amplified when the Skitch and Market shutdowns follow in quick succession.
Third-order effects
- If the 2015 pattern holds at Evernote and Microsoft alike, large platform vendors consolidate around flagship products while third-party specialists absorb the abandoned niches — and users learn to price companion-app betas as disposable, favoring tools from vendors committed to the long haul.
- A sustained cull like this pressures Evernote's positioning as a multi-product productivity suite toward a narrower notes-and-capture identity, with each retirement narrowing what the brand can credibly promise new users.
The trend: Platform companies are entering a consolidation phase in which single-purpose companion apps are culled so development concentrates on core products, leaving niche categories to independent specialists.