Vine won’t be removed from the app stores, will instead relaunch as “Vine Camera”

In October, Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine, its app that let users create and share 6-second looping videos. Today, the company says it won’t actually pull the Vine app from the app store as it had earlier implied, but will rather transition to a new, low-maintenance app called Vine Camera. From this new app, you’ll still be able to record Vine videos, but the larger Vine community will be gone.

Vine Camera will launch in January, replacing the Vine app that’s live today.

The videos recorded using the new app can be saved to your camera roll or posted directly to Twitter, the company says. That’s a similar strategy that Facebook-owned Instagram uses among its ecosystem of apps, too. Instead of trying to build them into their own social media brands, Instagram’s Hyperlapse, Boomerang, and Layout just feed content back to the main Instagram application.

Vine Camera will do the same.

In addition, Twitter will attempt to move the Vine user base to Twitter.

The company says that it will introduce a new way to follow your favorite Vine stars on Twitter in the days ahead. “Stay tuned for a ‘Follow  on Twitter’ notification soon,” the company said in a blog post announcing the news, but didn’t offer further details on this part of the transition.

The Vine website will continue to live on, as Twitter earlier promised. This will remain the place where you can browse through and watch all of the Vine videos created over the years.

While many Vine regulars were upset about the shutdown, Twitter’s handling of this situation is better than how most companies in a similar position would have proceeded. It has turned down acquisition bids, in fact, and is instead handling the closure itself.

Unfortunately, it’s fairly common for under-performing products to simply get closed down entirely on a given date (hopefully, after a brief “data export” period), rather than kept at least partially online.

vine-export

Of course, if you’re ready to leave Vine for good, that’s still an option. Twitter had said it would offer a way for Vine users to export their videos and that feature is live on the Vine.co website now. It will also continue to offer exporting tools from its iOS and Android apps ahead of the transition to Vine Camera.