Street View makes it simple to get a 360-degree view of almost any street, making it ideal for researching potential trip destinations or to take a casual tour of the world from the comfort of home. Now this app for both Android and iOS is set to be discontinued early next year, and it’ll be removed from app stores in the coming weeks.
Basically, what Google is saying that people have always relied on Maps to use Street View, so it doesn’t see the point of having a standalone Street View app on Android. Clearing up the decks by discontinuing the app, Google can shift the resources for improvements on the existing Street View interface within Google Maps.
This is a relatively new feature that only launched last year. It allowed you to contribute your own imagery of places that Street View didn’t already cover with your own 2D photos. These would then be strung together to cover locations that haven’t been shot with Google’s cameras. One of the notices says “Photo Paths are going away”, so it seems the company is shutting this feature down. Existing imagery will still be accessible through Google Maps.
