Samsung has discontinued the Samsung Mall shopping app a year and a half after its launch. The shutdown was expected as the Korean company started notifying the app's users since May this year that the service will no longer be available after June 30. Users opening the Samsung Mall app after June are greeted with a message about the discontinuation of the service and asking them to uninstall the app.
While Samsung hasn’t offered any reasons for the shutdown, it is most probably due to lack of customer interest in the service. Before its demise, the app had more than 5 million downloads on the Play Store, most of which were probably from pre-installations on Samsung’s budget devices. The company has now removed the app from the Google Play Store.
The Korean tech giant debuted the Samsung Mall app on the Galaxy On7 Prime in January 2018. It was an AI-backed shopping app that was exclusive to the Galaxy customers in India. The app enabled users to shoot or use an existing picture of any product to initiate an AI-powered visual search across multiple shopping sites, compare prices, and make purchases from within the app.
While the idea sounds nice in concept, it never really offered any value to the customers. Shopping directly on partner sites such as Amazon, TATA CliQ, Shopclues, Jabong, and others made more sense, both in terms of cost and convenience, than buying through the Samsung Mall app.
