RIP Paper: Facebook shreds its experimental, redesigned app for iOS

Facebook’s Paper is no more. The company is shutting down the app, which was an attempt at redesigning the standard Facebook app, but ultimately failed to capture serious attention from a large number of users.

Paper was interesting solely because of its design — the app had customizable sections for different topics, including politics, technology, food, and so on. Paper was originally released in 2014, and was designed by Mike Matas from Push Pop Press, a design firm that Facebook bought in 2011.

“Our goal with Paper was to explore new, immersive, interactive design elements for reading and interacting with content on Facebook, and we learned how important these elements are in giving people an engaging experience,” said Facebook in a message to users.

Paper was launched as somewhat of an experiment, allowing users to experience Facebook in a new and interesting way. It was centered on consuming news content, however, it was only released to the iPhone, never getting an iPad version or an Android version. Paper was also the only app you could use to go through your news feed and reply to messages in the one app — the Messenger app was rolled out of the standard Facebook iOS app.

Despite being highly praised for its design, Paper hasn’t been in the most downloaded app list, which features 1,500 apps, since December 2014, according to a report from The Verge.

Of course, while the actual app is going to app heaven, certain concepts from the app have made their way over to the standard Facebook app. Instant Articles, for example, has a very similar design to Paper, including how it handles images and the fact that it lets publishers create their own custom designs.

It appears as though the app has already been removed from the app store.