Yahoo shuts down News Digest as Verizon clean up begins

Yahoo News DigestVerizon-owned Yahoo has decided to shutter its News Digest app on both Android and iOS at the end of the month, just three years after launching the app.

Launched in 2014, the app was created based on UK teenager Nick D’Aloisio’s technology that compresses news from other outlets into shorter articles. Yahoo offered D’Aloisio £20m for his technology and offered him a full-time job, but he turned it down and chose to go to university.

The decision to shut down the app is the first sign of major change following the closure of Verizon’s $4.5bn (£3.6bn) acquisition of Yahoo earlier this month. And the newly acquired Yahoo is hoping to direct News Digest users toward using its Newsroom app instead.

“We will not be creating any new digests as of 30 June 2017. We’ve loved serving you guys all these years,” Yahoo in an update to its News Digest app download page. “To get more of the same great news coverage, please download the Newsroom app.”

It has been reported that Verizon would begin to make cuts – not just to services, but to jobs as well – once it completed the acquisition of Yahoo and then combined it with AOL to form ‘Oath’. Plans are in place to use Oath to trial a TV streaming service.

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