Vine to shut down app 'in the coming months'

Vine is nearing its final loop.

Twitter-owned video sharing app Vine has announced it will be shutting down "in the coming months." The social network built entirely on sharing and viewing auto-looping 6-second videos has been around since 2013, coming in and out of popularity independently of Twitter.

The Vine app has over 50 million installs on Google Play, but of course that doesn't always translate to a sustainable number of active users. Twitter never really integrated Vine into the core Twitter experience, and has even actively worked in parallel with more robust video features than Vine offered itself. Some creative users took full advantage of Vine to grow massive audiences, but the average Vine user wasn't regularly engaging with the service.

End of the line for Vine.

At the same time, people have continued to flock toward more interesting picture and video sharing apps like Instagram and Snapchat, which have more interaction, far more users and more tools to share what's happening in your life. When you look at the landscape for mobile video, it's clear that Vine wasn't long for this world.

Right now we don't have an exact timeline for when the Vine apps will be shut down, but Vine does say that you'll have ample time to download your Vines and continue to view videos on the Vine website.