The Foursquare check-in officially is no more. The newly revamped Foursquare is now a Yelp-like local discovery app, while check-ins have been relegated to Swarm.

But the transition to Swarm, which first launched in May, has not been an easy one for Foursquare's base.

For his part, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is confident the new Foursquare-Swarm combination is the right model for the now five-year-old company that pioneered the check-in.

"In the first two quarters of this year, we'll make more money than we did all of last year," Crowley predicted at a ReadWriteWeb event in San Francisco last month.

While it's too early to tell whether the app will succeed financially, many longtime users are struggling to understand how to use the app, which basically invented the check-in, without the check-in. Crowley has explained the move by saying that most people only use Foursquare exclusively for checking in or exclusively for discovery; few do both.

Brian Blau, research director and consumer technologist at Gartner, says he thinks shifting away from the check-in was a smart move, but acknowledges that the company is moving into a space that is already very crowded.

"I think they’re going to have a difficult time," Blau, told Mashable. "There’s a lot of app companies today that understand there’s a good opportunity with local businesses and helping those businesses connect with their customers through mobile apps. There a lot of businesses that are vying for it."

Foursquare says it plans to bring some of Foursquare's "game" features to Swarm but it might not be enough to convince those loyal to the original. Image: Foursquare

While any new app experiences growing pains, Swarm has been available for nearly two months and the experience between the two apps is far from seamless. Updates have fixed some of the bugs and crashes, but the app still feels haphazard and disjointed. Venues are still difficult to find, tips still only live in the original Foursquare app and, anecdotally, I have yet to see one of my 50-plus friends use the Plans feature.

Foursquare does say it will be making changes to Swarm that emulate some of the features that made Foursquare popular, including some game mechanics such as new stickers that will be similar to badges in the old app, and a new version of mayorships. Foursquare could still fix Swarm's problems, but it may be too little, too late. The company has failed to persuade many people why they should use two apps to get the same experience they used to get with one.

Foursquare executives say it's only a small — though admittedly loud — percentage of users that don't like Swarm, but App Store rankings and user reviews suggest otherwise.

I loved using @foursquare but I do not understand the point of @swarmapp why on earth do you need 2 apps. Bring back the original! — Hannah (@hansyhobs) July 23, 2014

Data from App Annie shows that after debuting in the top 100 apps in the App Store, Swarm quickly plummeted before recovering slightly to the 367th position it currently occupies.

While its rankings are not as abysmal as when it first launched (the app at one point sunk to No. 1,494), with an average App Store rating of 1.5, Swarm can hardly be accused of winning over users. Its Google Play rating is slightly better, 3.6 as of this writing, though reviews for the current version of the app are overwhelmingly one- and two-star negative reviews.

Swarm immediately plummeted in App Store rankings after its launch, and although downloads recovered somewhat, it still ranks far below the Top 100 apps. Image: App Annie

It's not just Swarm that's unpopular — ratings for the flagship app have also dipped in Apple's App Store and Google Play, and the most recent reviews are filled with disappointed users questioning why Foursquare did away with the check-in.

Also, why did #Foursquare create a separate app for check-ins? I thought check-ins were the whole point of Foursquare. #Swarm — Kristi (@kristisan) July 23, 2014

David Weekly, a product manager at Facebook who worked on another unbundled app called Messenger, summed up user frustration in a post on Medium titled, "Dear Foursquare: A Breakup Letter."

"You were a hallmark of good mobile design; an app that used my context to allow me to do something novel, useful and simple," Weekly wrote. "But now, now you’ve failed at everything you were once good at. You didn’t stay true to your roots ... That would be fine if Swarm had been brilliantly conceived, svelte in aesthetic and incredibly robust ... But then Swarm sucked."