"Netflix for Magazines" shutter their Windows Phone AND Windows app

Readly is a service which offers access to more than 1200 magazines worldwide, including 10,000 back issues, for only $9.99 per month. Publications include Rolling Stone, Women’s Health, ESPN The Magazine, Men’s Health, Saveur, Popular Science, Prevention, Men’s Journal, and more.

Like Netflix the service can support up to 5 devices with one account, meaning you can share the flat monthly fee with quite a few family members.

Since they had both an app for Windows and Windows Phone we have written about the company on a few occasions.

Now the company has informed their Windows on both platforms that they will be shutting both their Windows and Windows Phone app due to the now familiar reason – lack of usage.

They write:

We are contacting you today to let you know that we’ve decided to close the Windows version of the Readly app. Unfortunately the number of customers using the Windows version doesn’t motivate the effort for maintaining the app so going forward we’ve decided to work harder on developing our iOS/Android/Kindle apps and our web service instead.

Fortunately you can still read your favourite magazines with the Readly apps for iOS, Android, or Kindle Fire devices which we will continue to develop and improve to give you the best user experience possible. If you don’t have access to any of these devices our web service (https://go.readly.com/) is your best alternative.

The Readly Windows app will be maintained and fully operational until February 27th 2017. After this date, the app will not function any more and you should delete it from your Windows computer. First, log out of the app and then delete it. By doing this you will make Readly available on one more device (as you know, you can use Readly on up to five devices).

It is of course no surprise that the small number of Windows Phone users are not enough to motivate a company, but it is worrying that the hundreds of millions of users on Windows 8 and 10 were not enough to keep Readly’s interest up. The news is a reality check for those who believe the large Windows 10 user base can help retain apps on the platform, even in UWP form.

The app can be seen, for the next month at least, in the store here.

[appbox windowsstore 9wzdncrdjpfx]