Foursquare splits into two: New social sharing app Swarm to join legacy location app

Popular search app Foursquare will soon be split into two separate apps. One of these would be purely for discovering places while the other for finding what their friends are up to.   According to a post on Foursquare’s official blog, the company spoke with many users of the app and realised that most of them used it for either finding a place or meeting with friends who are nearby. Very few used it to discover a place and also meet their friends at the same place.   The posts further states, “As it turns out, each time you open the app, you almost always do just one of those things. At home, you may be searching for a place for dinner. After dinner, you are probably looking to see what friends nearby are up to. That’s why today, we’re announcing that we’re un-bundling these two experiences into two separate apps – Foursquare, and a new app called Swarm.”   With Swarm the company wants to offer a fast and quick way for users to not only share what they are up to, but also find out where their friends are and what they are doing as well. Swarm will be initially available for iOS and Android and will be rolled out for Windows Phone later. You can also sign up for Swarm app and get notified as soon as it’s launched.   The main Foursquare app will also undergo some changes. It will be more discovery-focussed than the current iteration of the app. The refurbished Foursquare app will aim to offer more refined local searches based on preferences along with opinions of the experts rather than strangers. As of now the new version is in its final stages and will see a release later this year.