Material

Material’s personalized news service ended after its January 28, 2014 final edition; January 31 is an inferred dated-confirmation proxy.

Sources and shutdown details ↘

Search & answers · Closed; date inferred · 31 Jan 2014 · Observed closed by · Not the verified service cutoff · Inq Mobile

The record

A semantic news-discovery application that learned from social-network activity and reading interests to assemble two personalized magazine editions a day.

Operator at shutdown: Inq Mobile Company source
Launched: 13 Feb 2013Launch source
Service end: Closed; date inferred · 31 Jan 2014Observed closed by · Not the verified service cutoffClosure source

Sources and verification

Mobile World Live — direct Inq closure statement ↗ · Checked 28 Oct 2026

Verification notes

Shutdown: The January 31, 2014 original trade report directly records Inq’s statement that January 28 was Material’s final personalized edition, while SO.HO continued to function without updates. The displayed January 31 is an explicitly inferred dated-confirmation proxy, not a measured backend cutoff or Inq’s founding date. The exact first retirement announcement, account-access cutoff, hour and timezone are unknown. Material’s whole semantic discovery and personalized-edition service is the scope; surviving cached/offline editions, SO.HO, INQ phones and later unrelated Material products are excluded. The operator’s own retrospective names semantic technology, social-graph analysis and algorithmic intelligence as core to this standalone reader; the launch release documents adaptive learning of reading interests. February 13, 2013 is the announced public Android beta, not the later iOS release. London is the original operator’s expressly stated operating city. Artwork is a labeled operator-mark proxy, not a recovered app icon. Closure source
Dates checked: Verified 28 Oct 2026
AI functionality: AI functionality source
Launch: The issuer’s February 13, 2013 release explicitly makes the Android beta publicly downloadable; August’s iOS distribution is a platform expansion, not a second product.
Location: United Kingdom · London. The original issuer’s product-launch release expressly states Inq Mobile was based in London. This is the evidenced operator operating-city proxy, not a confirmed Material team street address. Coordinates are the GeoNames city point rounded to two decimal places. Location source · Coordinate source