Facebook has the right reason shutting down these apps.
Why are people so afraid of the truth? Why do we always tip-toe around things like this - it's not like you purposely tried to make her have negative feelings.
Facebook treats friendship as something binary. You're friends or you're not. Friendships don't work that way, though. You don't usually wake up and suddenly become "not friends" with someone. You drift apart one minute at a time. Maybe someone moves, gets married, has kids. Someone else moves. Someone gets divorced, switches jobs, goes to graduate school on the other side of the world. By the end of all this, someone who you once spent time with every day is not really a part of your life anymore, but you can't really point to a moment when "it" happened.
I know there's a whole set of settings one can go through to limit the content you see from certain people, etc. etc. but that's also another huge problem with Facebook in general. They take it upon themselves to decide for you which friends are more deserving of your attention. 90% of the time, it's never right. I consider myself a pretty tech savy guy and even I couldn't be bothered trying to understand how to do something like that. It's easier, for a lot of people, to just remove someone from their daily news feed.
I used Social Fixer for this feature alone. I used it because the way I use Facebook (and everyone uses Facebook differently) is to keep in touch with old friends, the friends that moved, got married, graduated. I feel deceptively connected to these people even though I'm not because I have a way to sort of keep tabs without having to keep tabs on them. When they stop appearing in my news feed, they traverse into that vague friend/not-friend category and I'm left wondering what Tom has been up to all these years. Social Fixer usually would let me know that Tom has actually deleted his Facebook account and that's why he has appeared to vanish from my digital life. Sometimes it told me that Jane has unfriended me and I was left assuming Jane got tired of all the gifs I was posting.
I'm serious. Every single criticism about why that feature (and this one too, by the looks of it) is terrible is rooted in the desire to mislead someone. Whether that be about friend status or whether you read their messages.
I like this comment, I think it explains why it's not as simple as being honest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624928
The ones who were worth keeping responded in some form or fashion z:)