In order to focus on fundamentals, Snap is pivoting away from drones

The ambitious launch of Snap's drone business has been completed four months later. The device was unveiled in April by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel at the annual Snap Partner Summit, which aims to make aerial selfies easy for anyone, no matter what their experience level with drones.

During the unveiling of this event, a flying camera that follows its user by gesture control was impressive. It showed how adept Snap has become at creating hardware that can be easily integrated into Snapchat that is ready-for-mainstream use. In addition, a drone, as Quartz noted at the time, didn't seem urgent or necessary for Snap's future.

The poor performance of Snap's stock appears to have led it to the same conclusion. The share price of Snap has declined from $28 to $12 since Pixy was introduced. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Spiegel announced the Pixy closure at a recent companywide meeting.

To capture cinematic shots of their daily activities and travels, Snapchat caters to social media influencers. Despite their science fiction allure, drones haven't captured the imagination of the average US consumer.  The Federal Aviation Administration reports that there are only about 500,000 non-commercial drones registered in the US.

Instagram influencers that Snapchat caters to use drones to capture cinematic footage of their daily activities and travels all the time. Despite their science fiction allure, drones still haven't caught the imagination of the average consumer in the US. Only about 500,000 drones are registered in the US, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

It is now unclear whether the company will also pull back from hardware experimentation with its latest augmented reality product, Spectacles. In addition to Spectacles, the company's less powerful, camera-based Spectacles 3 has not exactly taken off as mainstream consumer products.

Despite Snap's hardware misstep, the near future looks promising. The Snap+ subscription service has already attracted over 1 million users.

The Snap Originals project continues to mature, and its daily active users continue to grow rising from an average of 332 million in the first quarter to 347 million in the second quarter of 2022.

The Pixy product will not be supported any longer by Snap, according to Quartz. As of this writing, those still interested in buying the $230 device can do so.

Despite Apple's new privacy policies, Snap appears to be responding by focusing on its fundamentals: Snapchat and its other software innovations. As a result, Pixy, an experiment that could take time to develop and become a profitable product, currently sits on the sidelines.