"I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I have been in a real funk these last few days over this news," says Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, speaking about the decision to shutter the Foursquare City Guide mobile app later this year and focus solely on its check-in app, Swarm. The move actually reverses a bold 2014 decision by Foursquare to tear its app asunder into two vastly different properties: one for discovery and exploration and another, Swarm, for sharing your location to find nearby friends.

It is no surprise then that the Foursquare app will be shutting down on December 15 of this year. Foursquare isn't a subject of conversation lately as much as other social networking sites, and it's not surprising for that reason. When Foursquare first came out, people would contend to be the "mayor" of their favorite location and didn't really worry so much about safety concerns about location sharing in real time.

Still, the first iteration of Foursquare, the original app, had proven a brilliant way to explore cities and their offerings as one of the first examples of social networks using location-based functionalities of smartphones to build an entirely new type of experience.

Now, that mass of collected data that fueled the company's City Guide will disappear for its end users.

Writes Foursquare in an email to users, "After so many amazing years of leaving tips and reviews around the world together, we've decided it's time to say goodbye to the City Guide app …" The app itself will shut down Dec. 15, although the web version will soon join it in that state, the email said.

The move made Crowley a little nostalgic about what it is to say goodbye to a product he spent such a long time working on.

The founder, in a post on Threads, wrote, "I have a really good blog post somewhere in me about 'the danger of falling in love with the companies you build & products you create,' but it's not the right time to write it.". The 'neglect of FSQ's apps' story has been a drumbeat in my personal online experience for like 5 years now, and I let it affect me more than I should (aka: 'dude, just get over it' is easier said than done).

While Foursquare the company lives on Crowley notes it has more than $100m in revenue in his follow-up post it will center its labors on the check-in part of the activity, not the City Guide.

He also makes time to shout out the "old-school" consumer Foursquare product, engineering and infrastructure teams for all their work over the years as well as to the super-user community that kept the app going this long.

"I'm genuinely curious what FSQ (the company) is going to do [with] Swarm, and will always be rooting for the team and products," Crowley added.

Of course, the founder himself isn't the only one mourning the end. Users and fans of Foursquare- be they present or past- have been posting how they feel about this app being closed by stating that it's a "gut punch," "sad," or just offering them their "RIP"-style condolences.

Josh Williams, who co-founded Gowalla, a main competitor to Foursquare, also said goodbye to the app nicely, commenting, "It's weird how different the web used to be when these apps were mainstream.

"We don't have to moan a lot about how the internet used to be fun and this and that, but certainly there's truth to it.". "Some joy has been robbed from us in our quest for efficiency," Williams wrote on Threads. "I still believe there are to be commercially viable products that bring people IRL, but that is quite a lonely road to walk. Foursquare made the web and our digital lives a much better place," he added.

Crowley is no longer working full-time for Foursquare but is still the company's cochair on its board. As LinkedIn reports, he has instead been working on "something new" since August.