It was only a couple of years ago that Facebook launched the standalone Messenger app, back then you could chat with friends using both the main app and this new app, however Facebook later made it mandatory to download Messenger if you wanted to chat with friends via your mobile device. You couldn’t do it anymore via the main Facebook app. Now it’s doing something similar for the relatively new Moments private photo sharing app. The company has announced today that it’s going to discontinue support for photo syncing soon and will ask users to download Moments instead.
Facebook will ask users to download Moments on their device by a notification which will pop up on the top of their News Feed. Users will no longer be able to access photos they have privately synced from their phone in a separate album on Facebook, instead they’ll need to download Moments for that purpose.
Moments allows users to privately share photos with their friends, the app has proven to be quite popular, and Facebook has been pushing it hard as it feels this app has mainstream potential. That’s one of the reasons why its pushing people who used the photo syncing feature to this app.
Facebook confirms that those who move over to Moments will find their previously synced photos available in the app, users who don’t want to download the app can get a .zip files of all their privately synced photos or delete them from the social network if they no longer want to keep them around.
The social network will shut down the photo syncing feature on January 10th.
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