Verizon announced Monday it will shutter its app store within the next two months and will pull the related apps from Android and BlackBerry phones by March 2013. Wide swaths of customers will be forced to fall back on alternatives, including the Google Play Store, Amazon’s Appstore, and the BlackBerry App World.

Verizon’s VCast apps have been crufting up the home screens of customers for a few years now. They made the not so seamless transition from the relatively walled app garden found on feature phones to the wide open plains of smartphones. On Android and BlackBerry, Verizon’s mystifyingly bad apps were all but overshadowed in quality and responsiveness by offering on those platforms’ app stores, and yet Verizon continued to prominently place the icons on phones’ home screens. In 2011, Verizon attempted to pivot VCast apps into the “Verizon Apps” store, which customers continued to ignore.

In its blog post announcing the closing, Verizon attempts to soothe troubled minds by pointing out “most apps existing on Verizon Apps are already available on multiple app storefronts” like Google Play. The company fails to pinpoint the real good news: Verizon customers won’t have to bother with these eyesores on their phones any longer.