It has been three years since Google introduced a feature called “Nearby Notifications”, which made it possible for Android users to find “apps and content” based on their current location.

While Google hopefully had the best of intentions with this particular feature, it appears that it has gone off the rails a bit. In a blog post published to the Android Developers portal on Thursday, the Android team has confirmed that it will be shutting the feature down. It will be a gradual shutdown, with the company halting notifications on December 6, 2018.

“We’ve learned a lot building and launching Nearby Notifications. However, earlier this year, we noticed a significant increase in locally irrelevant and spammy notifications that were leading to a poor user experience. While filtering and tuning can help, in the end, we have a very high bar for the quality of content that we deliver to users, especially content that is delivered through notifications. Ultimately, we have determined these notifications did not meet that bar. As a result, we have decided to discontinue support for Nearby Notifications. We will stop serving Nearby Notifications on December 6th, 2018.”

The resulting spam notifications wasn’t what Google wanted to happen, but the reality is much worse for Android users, potentially. As a result, Google’s shutting down the feature and moving on. The team says that all this means for Android users is that they will stop receiving these types of notifications altogether once the final date rolls around.

Three years and the feature’s done. But, considering it hasn’t resulted in the best user experience, it’s good that Google’s shutting it down.

What do you think of Google shutting down Nearby Notifications?