Facebook kills

Facebook kills Lifestage app aimed at teens and students, to incorporate lessons into main app

Facebook has put to rest the Lifestage app as quietly as it had first launched it in 2016. Developed by 20-year-old Facebook employee Michael Sayman, the app was targeted only at high schoolers aged 21 and less to help them find and connect with other classmates who went to the same school. However, theSnapchat-inspired app failed to ride up the success ladder and instead led to privacy concerns.

Lifestage allowed teens to share selfies and videos through the app which would be then visible to all of their classmates. The video diary-like service was launched on iOS and never made it to the Android platform. However, the app has now been pulled down from the App Store. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the app hadn’t been updated for months and never managed to crack the App Store’s top charts during its short lifespan, thereby confirming its demise.

The move to axe Lifestage comes amidst the astounding success of Facebook’s Instagram which recorded 700 million monthly active users owing to its Snapchat-inspired features. Since the adoption of Stories feature, Instagram has added close to 200 million monthly active users. Although Snapchat pioneered the video-centric way of instant messaging, embellished with live filters and auto-delete, Facebook cleverly incorporated the popular features into its own set of apps including WhatsApp and became more successful than the platform it aspired to once acquire. ALSO READ: Cloning Snapchat Stories worked beautifully for Instagram, it now has 700 million monthly active users

To recall, Lifestage, which claimed to be designed specifically for high schoolers, said it blocked people who list their age as over 21 in the app from joining a school or looking up other accounts. However, the loosely secure app allowed anyone to fake their age and pretend to be a high-schooler. While Facebook has good reasons to shut down Lifestage, the company now plans to use the learning from the app’s failure and incorporate it into features of the main Facebook app.