After two years of launching the standalone video app, Facebook has confirmed its decision to shut down Lasso on the 10th of July, 2020. On Wednesday, Lasso released a push notifications to its users, notifying them that the app would be shut down. A Facebook spokesperson told the media that Lasso is one of their experimental apps, and thanks everyone that shared their creativity via the app. The spokesperson noted that Lasso was estimated to have about 10 million downloads, but would now be pulled down from every app stores.
Lasso, a short-video sharing app by Facebook Inc. was initially released in November, 2018 for Android and iOS. The app was targeted at the teenage population, and intended to rival TikTok – which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet company. In 2018, TikTok became a sensation among teenagers, after the mother company went into a merger with the lip-syncing app – Musical.ly.
Lasso, at its stage of functionality, allows people to record a 15 second video over an underlying music. This service, however, was not available worldwide, it was only available in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Uruguay, El Salvador, Peru, and a handful of other South American countries. Lasso’s biggest market, at its peak was a meagre 80,000+ users in Mexico, and 70,000+ users in the USA.