A little more than two years after its debut, Tuned, Meta‘s social app for couples, is coming to an end. Users, including the author of this story, started getting notifications last week warning them of the coming shutdown and urging them to retrieve their data before September 19, when the app would stop functioning.
The New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team at Meta worked on the Tuned project. The NPE team was originally established to create consumer-facing apps that would enable Meta to test out new features and monitor user reactions.
With texting capabilities and quizzes made to help couples communicate their thoughts, activities, and upcoming milestones, Tuned was introduced in the early months of the epidemic as a means for couples to stay in touch and involved.
Through the Spotify link, Tuned’s users could share notes, lists, challenges, voice messages, photographs, videos, and music.
They could choose a password or a blur filter for more personal content, as well as define their own individual moods.
With prompts to provide context, a “check-in” function encouraged partners to ascertain their thoughts about the relationship at any given time.
“With Tuned, you can capture and react to artifacts of your relationship digitally, creating a shared scrapbook for these memorable moments that you and your partner can easily scroll through and reminisce on,” Meta wrote in a blog post published in April 2020. “Send photo snapshots, notes, cards, voice memos, and more, without broadcasting to the world or fear of messaging the wrong person.”
The fact that Tuned stood out for having few connections to Meta goods like Instagram, Facebook, and Facebook Dating may have been the cause of its demise.
Tuned was only downloaded about 909,000 times across the Apple App Store and Google Play, claims Craig Chapple, a mobile insights specialist at app analytics company Sensor Tower.
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