A couple of years ago, LinkedIn created separate apps for many of it's functions because their app was getting too bloated. Their thought process was if you want to use LinkedIn Groups, use the LinkedIn Groups app. If you wanted to recruit new employees, use the Recruiter app.
This made perfect sense at the time.
Yesterday LinkedIn announced it was retiring the Groups app to streamline the LinkedIn experience.
My first thought was similar to the retiring of the Pulse app last year.
When LinkedIn retired the Pulse app and access to Pulse articles on their website, they moved all of articles into the LinkedIn newsfeed. I had mixed feelings about this because I liked using the Pulse app on my iPad to read new articles from authors and media outlets that I subscribed to.
Once they integrated the Pulse content into the newsfeed and stopped calling it Pulse, I missed a lot of new content. Even worse, they made it almost impossible to subscribe to new content or unsubscribe from content that was no longer relevant.
Now LinkedIn is retiring the Groups app.
The LinkedIn Groups app is no longer available in the App Store and will stop functioning on February 15th if you have it on your iOS device.
Going forward, to access LinkedIn Groups, look under the Work menu on your desktop or through the search bar on your LinkedIn mobile app. WARNING, searching for Groups on your mobile device is not easy!
Personally I'm not sure if this will help or hurt LinkedIn Groups. As you know, I'm not a big fan of LinkedIn Groups since they turned into spam buckets by aggressive marketers. In the past, there were great discussions and you could get help from experts. Today, aggressive marketers blast the same content to multiple groups every day and there is virtually no interaction in most groups.
I won't miss the LinkedIn Groups app because I never use Groups. Do you use LinkedIn Groups and do you get business from Groups? Let me know because I'd like to learn more about how you use Groups.
Here's LinkedIn's official announcement.
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/86907/linkedin-groups-app-for-ios-will-be-retired
