Social media giant Facebook has a habit of cloning popular apps and features from its competitors into its own apps. Facebook's Instagram has cloned so many features from rival social network Snapchat to its own platform. And so has WhatsApp.
Facebook has announced that its going to shutdown its video chat app called Bonfire by the end of May as it didn't receive the interest the company thought it would.
Launched in 2017, the Bonfire app was a clone of the group video chat app called 'HouseParty'.
The HouseParty app use to be popular some years back ago. The app had a synchronous group chat feature where participants would open the app to see those that were already online so as they could hang out digitally. Facebook felt threatened and introduced Bonfire to rival HouseParty.
However, HouseParty didn't reached the expectation that Facebook thought it would. According to reports, the HouseParty app rank in the App Store declined to #327 a year ago, which was no longer a threat to Facebook. The social giant didn't see the need to challenge the app again, and then decided to kill Bonfire.
When HouseParty app was building momentum, Facebook made Bonfire available in Denmark and a few countries in Europe last year. A cached Play Store page shows that it never reached 10,000 downloads on Android.
Bonfire has been removed from the Play Store and Facebook says it will support Bonfire till the end of the month.
"In May we'll be ending support for the Bonfire tests. We'll incorporate elements of whats we learned into other current future products," Facebook told Verge.