After Amazon announced in March that it was planning to shut down Diapers.com and all the other eCommerce sites operated by Quidsi, the company it acquired in 2010 — the online retailer has pulled all of the Quidsi apps from its app store.
According to Tech Crunch, while Amazon did not make any announcement about the apps’ shutdown, it does appear that they were pulled late last week. It’s important to note that the apps are still functional, but pulling them means new users cannot download them and Amazon can stop using developer resources to keep them updated or patch them with bug fixes.
At one point, Quidsi had half a dozen published mobile shopping apps across both platforms, including an iOS and Android app for its flagship site Diapers.com, as well as cross-platform versions of Wag.com and Soap.com. In addition, it also had iOS apps for its less popular sites: AfterSchool.com, BeautyBar.com, Bookworm.com, Casa.com, VineMarket.com, and YoYo.com.
Amazon said that it decided to close down Quidsi because it failed to turn a profit after the acquisition. But one report stated that just a few months before the announcement, execs told Quidsi staff that it was expected to reach profitability this year, leading some to question if Amazon’s feud with Quidsi’s founder, Marc Lore, was the real reason behind the decision to shut it down.
Regardless of the reason, Tech Crunch points out that none of Quidsi’s mobile applications were performing well in app store. At the time of Amazon’s announcement, Diapers.com was ranked #257 in the Shopping category on the app store, while the other brands were ranked even lower. And VineMarket.com was no longer tracked as of March 24, 2017, which indicates it may have been pulled even earlier.
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