According to Intel, the reason behind the demise of the service is that the company wants to ”focus more than ever on developing the next generation of platform innovation.” In case you are using AppUp Intel urges you not to uninstall, as your downloaded apps won't work in case you do and you won't be able to download the AppUp store again after March 11th. Intel even offers refunds to end users who have purchased apps on AppUp and the offer is valid from January 28th, 2014 through December 19th, 2014.
Intel simply could not fight the big leaders in this market including Apple, Google and Microsoft and all three of them have done a better job at sales, marketing and essentially they all had better knowledge of software and software related services than Intel. We cannot blame Intel for trying. Traditionally Intel drifts away from its core business and tries new things, but when it fails it simply goes back to building great processors and fabs, as this is what Intel is good at. Intel also sold OnCue aka Intel TV to Verizon, again a cute project that never launched and never succeeded as a commercial product.
In case you want to learn more about the AppUp shutdown, please go to Intel’s official AppUp updated FAQ and learn more here.