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Microsoft kills select MSN apps, Photosynth for iOS and Windows Phone

MSN Travel for Windows, Windows Phone, Android and iOS app will be discontinued on September 28, 2015.

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MSN Food & Drink, MSN Travel and MSN Health & Fitness will all go away before the end of the year.

Because of this, the impact to each app will vary.

Photosynth allows users to create 3D photographic panoramas to share with other users, but will be replaced by the emerging Photosynth Preview Technology. But the remainder of the app mimicked a Web page: Users could explore and pore through various recipes, for example, and read “news” on topics like “America’s Best Fast Food Shakes”.

In tandem with this, Neowin reports that Microsoft is withdrawing its Photosynth photo-stitching app. The online service will continue, but users of the app are advised to upload their images if they want to be able to use them in the future. Oddly, Health & Fitness will be discontinued a little later; it lives on until November 1.

Microsoft recently announced that it’s firing 7,800 people, majority from the Phone Hardware division, as it works to rethink its mobile strategy, and now the company continues this reorganization by dropping some of the apps it offered on smartphones running Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. Thereafter, Microsoft brought out a comprehensive software development kit (SDK) for the Microsoft Health app, enabling developers frame apps exclusively for the band.

Microsoft is planning to drop a number of its MSN-branded apps (formerly Bing apps) over the next several months.

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The MSN Travel app just culls information from the Web site. However, the level of usefulness will totally depend upon the amount of information that users store in their cloud-based accounts. In a statement, Microsoft said that it would continue to work on the apps with “broad consumer appeal”, indicating that the problem with these three is that they simply weren’t used enough. And maybe by then Windows 10 and Microsoft Health will have carved out a viable alternative. And now it seems that Microsoft is getting it, as well.

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