Facebook is shutting down Android contacts app Hello, fitness tracking app Moves, and anonymous teen social media app tbh due to “low usage”
We wanted to let you know that we are shutting down three apps due to low usage: Moves, tbh and Hello.
Context & Ripple Effects
The triple shutdown extends a pruning habit that predates it: Facebook already retired its Groups companion app in 2017 and folded Notify's news-alert technology into Messenger rather than keeping the app alive. What distinguishes this round is that all three casualties — Hello for Android contacts, the Moves fitness tracker, and the anonymous teen app tbh — die under a single 'low usage' rationale.
It also lands mid-year in a defensive stretch for the company: just months earlier, Facebook and Instagram had shut down or restricted several APIs in the wake of the data-protection backlash, so app surface area is shrinking on both the product and platform sides at once.
First-order effects
- Users of Hello, Moves and tbh lose their apps outright, and developers who built on those surfaces lose their distribution — the same abrupt cutoff Groups users faced when logins were disabled.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's teen-focused portfolio consolidates around fewer bets: with tbh gone, the remaining youth investment flows toward what survives, a path the company made explicit when it later restructured its 100+-person youth team around Messenger Kids while shuttering the LOL meme app.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's standalone experiments become feeder systems for the core apps rather than products in their own right — the Notify-to-Messenger absorption and the eventual shutdown of Instagram's standalone Direct app both point to a company that ships satellites only as long as they feed the main constellation.
The trend: Facebook is systematically retiring standalone apps that don't reinforce its core family, converting experimental products into features or shutting them down entirely.