Meta Discontinues Support for Custom Face Filters on Apps

Meta’s custom face filters on Instagram and Facebook will be discontinued from January 2025. Also being shut down are the tools, AR SDK, used to make these filters as Meta moves to close down its Spark Studio early next year. Meta will now only support the first-party AR effects. 

Meta is shuttering all third-party filters and AR effects on its social media portals that use these effects – Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger – on January 14^th, 2025. The tools used to create these effects will also be discontinued on the same date. The shutdown even affects the effects created by brands and other third-party developers, according to a blog post published last week. However, Meta’s own AR effects will stay in place.

The Meta Spark platform is widely used to make face filters similar to those in Snapchat and TikTok that can be applied to videos or images. It is also used to create filters for ads and AR games. In an FAQ on the looming shutdown of the Spark Studio platform, Meta said that videos with the Spark-made AR effects will remain on Facebook, Instagram, and in messages sent via its Messenger app.

Meta’s AR tools were introduced in 2017 and were a response to Snap’s widely popular AR features. Over the years, they have become a popular aspect of its platforms’ experiences that many creators have grown accustomed to. The decision to shut down this feature triggered complaints from various quarters, particularly in the Meta Spark Community Facebook group.

Despite the shutdown of its foremost Augmented Reality platform, Meta maintains it remains committed to the development of AR thanks to its “long-term investments in new computing platforms” that take users “beyond today’s 2D experiences on mobile”, it writes on the company blog. Meta argues that part of this commitment necessarily entails “shifting resources” to other experiences with new form factors like glasses. Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype will likely be unveiled and demoed later this month at Meta Connect.

If you have created AR effects with Meta Spark and wish to save them before they disappear from the platform, you can do so by following these steps outlined in Meta’s FAQ on Spark’s shutdown:

Downloading an AR Effect File

• Log into Meta Spark Hub
• Click Effects
• Then click on the specific effects you are interested in downloading.
• Click Files and download the file.

Downloading a Demo Video

• Start by logging in to Meta Spark Hub
• Then click Effects
• Click the specific effect you wish to download
• Click Details
• Below the Demo video, on the video, click on the three dots (for more options) and choose Download.

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