Search engine giant, Google is planning to launch a mobile messaging app similar to WhatsApp economictimes has revealed. Recall that the company lost in its bid to acquire WhatsApp to Facebook in a multimillion dollar deal that fell through.
Report says Google plans to launch its own version of the very successful mobile app messenger, and is likely going to test it in India as well as other emerging markets. Google is reported to have sent its top product manager, Nikhyl Singhal to India in its bid to catch up with its competitors in that field.
Sources close to the company revealed that the messenger is in its early stages of development, but the likelihood that it will be launched in 2015 cannot be ruled out; though sources close to Google declined any comment on the matter. In what could be termed as one of the biggest deals in the tech world, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion, with report suggesting that Google lost out in the bid process since it only offered a bid of $10 billion.
India has become one of the biggest testing grounds for Google in recent times. This could be as a result of the country’s large market, which is one of the biggest in the world.
It is not known at this time how successful this latest move would be considering the fact that instant messengers like WeChat, Viber, WhatsApp, and the rest have developed a large user-base that may be difficult to catch up with.
In an email sent to economictimes, Benedict Evans, former mobile analyst and a partner at Andreessen Horowitz said “Google would agree that it missed social and missed social on mobile. But then Facebook had to buy WhatsApp and Instagram for the same reason.”
“Around four years ago, there were at least close to 15 messaging apps with over 1 million daily active users and that didn’t include Whatsapp” said Aakrit Vaish,” owner of Haptik.
Singhal is the company’s product management director for Hangouts, Photos, Google+ core & Platform. The tour will also take him to other countries in Asia Pacific to understand local ecosystems better.
Only a few days ago, Google shut down Orkut, and has taken significant steps to improve on Google+, which by the way is not doing too bad.
Users will however, not be required to log into the messenger with their Google login.
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