Microsoft has a bunch of content aggregator apps under the MSN brand (and before that, the Bing brand): News, Weather, Sports, Money, Health & Fitness, Food & Drink, and Travel. These apps run on Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS, and Android.

Three of the apps are being shut down later this year: Travel, Food & Drink, and Health & Fitness. In a statement, Microsoft said that it would continue to work on the apps with "broad consumer appeal," indicating that the problem with these three is that they simply weren't used enough. The company says that nobody will be losing their jobs.

The Food & Drink and Travel apps will be discontinued on September 28. Oddly, Health & Fitness will be discontinued a little later; it lives on until November 1.

These decisions will have some knock-on consequences. Currently, Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant will link to the Travel app to give you details about upcoming flights and trips. The information Cortana links to may not be something you use every day, but it's certainly handy when you're travelling. It's possible that the service will just link to equivalent content from a different source in the future; after all, some of the information that the apps aggregated will continue to exist on the Web.

Ending development of the Health & Fitness app is also a little strange. This app wasn't just a news aggregator—it could also track workouts and diets, and it had a few other bits and pieces. Microsoft has been trying to expand its "health platform"—the online HealthVault service, the Band to collect fitness data, apps to tie them all together—and the Health app feels like it should, or at least could, be a part of this broader push. The company has a separate Health app that works with the Band; rolling some of the Health & Fitness app's capabilities into this app would also seem sensible.

In tandem with this, Neowin reports that Microsoft is withdrawing its Photosynth photo-stitching app. The online service will continue, but users of the app are advised to upload their images if they want to be able to use them in the future.