Mobile Devices

March 05, 2013

Yahoo Stops Offering Seven Products Including Mobile App for BlackBerry Smartphones

Yahoo’s mobile app for BlackBerry smartphones is among the seven products the social media company will soon stop offering.

Beginning on April 1, Yahoo will no longer offer the mobile app for BlackBerry. Nor will it be supported by Yahoo, ITProPortal said.

The other products that Yahoo will stop offering include: Yahoo Clues, Yahoo Sports IQ, Yahoo Updates API, Yahoo App Search, and the Yahoo Message Boards website. Also, Yahoo Avatars, which are images used by Yahoo customers, will no longer be supported.

Yahoo announced the discontinuation of the less successful products in a blog post last week, Reuters said.

CEO Marissa Mayer is trying to trim the company’s app offerings to somewhere between 12 and 15 – as opposed to the 60 to 75 now offered Yahoo. There was much scrutiny before discontinuing a product.

"The most critical question we ask is whether the experience is truly a daily habit that still resonates for all of you today," said Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's executive vice president of platforms, in a recent blog statement. “Before making these decisions, we look at a variety of factors. … Ultimately, we’re making these changes in an effort to sharpen our focus. By continuing to hone in on our core products and experiences, we’ll be able to make our existing products the very best they can be.”

Mayer explained that Yahoo is focusing on "the dozen or so applications that people use all the time on their phone," according to a report carried on MobilityTechzone. Yahoo’s key offerings focus on E-mail, search, news, finance and sports. The apps the company is dropping include those which have too few users or are not in the areas on which Yahoo focuses, media reports add.

“Now Yahoo is looking to make those experiences better for the 200 million monthly active users who use Yahoo on their mobile devices,” the Los Angeles Times said.

In addition, Yahoo's market share of the U.S. display ads will edge down to 8 percent this year compared to being 9 percent during 2012, EMarketer data says. In contrast, Google and Facebook are seeing increases in display ads market share, the data said.




Edited by Ashley Caputo


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