Through a post on its official blog on Sunday, the developers of EverythingMe launcher has announced that the app will be removed from the Google Play Store within the next few days. The company will be shutting down its launcher operations because of lack of revenues from the popular app, and says it will be “taking on new challenges and trying to make the world a better place bit by bit”. The reason given by the company for its decision, as mentioned already, is cash crunch, as the company apparently isn’t making enough money from the software to keep up with the expenses. The developers recommend using the Google Now launcher instead of their software, but there are other, more feature-filled options available on the Play Store.
Coming to what the devs say about their soon-to-be discontinued product, EverythingMe started off as a concept three years ago, to “make smartphones smarter”. Since its inception, the software has been downloaded some 15 million times, and the company claims that some of its core features like in-phone search and automatic creation and organization of ‘smart folders’, were also popular enough to be incorporated by other launchers and custom ROM makers. However, the company laments, “A great product is sometimes not enough”. That’s because, the post notes, “EverythingMe’s revenue model assumptions were based on contextual discovery – you get app and content recommendations that are relevant for you at the right time and place. The #’s we’ve shown were breaking all industry benchmarks, but growing in emerging markets meant we couldn’t convert this value-added discovery to significant income for the company to keep pursuing its vision and build its product”.
The company says it will stop offering support for the launcher “within the next few days”, and will also withdraw the app from the Google Play Store shortly. There is already clamor from certain quarters to open up the source code of EverythingMe so that development can continue, but so far, the developers have been tight-lipped about their future course of action. It remains to be seen if this is indeed the end of the road for EverythingMe, or if the source code will be opened up eventually. It that were to happen, the app will continue to live on, especially if it has a large enough community interested in maintaining the software.