In recent weeks, Facebook appears to have been shutting down many apps for its platform that offer services similar to what Facebook offers. For example, it shut down messaging app MessageMe, messaging app Voxer, social discovery app Wonder, Twitter’s video-sharing app Vine and photo app Vintage Camera.
Antoine Morcos, the developer behind Vintage Camera, said that when he received Facebook’s shut-down notification, “I was really shocked. Users were sharing as much as 6,000 photos per day on Facebook; now access is blocked.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, “Developers say the crackdown is an attempt to stifle applications that compete with Facebook-owned services or part of an effort to get developers to pay for ads on Facebook.”
Facebook’s Doug Purdy countered, “We enforce our policies for a variety of reasons, ranging from preventing spam and protecting the experience people have on Facebook, to the rare case when a developer is using our platform to replicate our core functionality without enabling people to share back to Facebook.”
