Months before WhatsApp agreed to Facebook’s offer of $19 billion, Google had contacted them and initiated negotiation for the same purpose. Reportedly, they had offered them $10 billion, which was refused. Facebook later finalized the deal, WhatsApp became a Facebook asset.
Google hasn’t forgotten the requirement and the need to acquire WhatsApp.
As per reports coming in from the technological world, it has been revealed that Google is now working on it’s own mobile messaging application, which will counter WhatsApp’s growing popularity. It seems Google has accepted the challenge, and will come out full throttle in the first the half of 2015.
Although this news hasn’t been confirmed by Google, but insiders are telling us that a secret team is working round the clock to finish off the development work, and testing will soon begin.
Some recent activities from Google actually support this rumor, such as:
– Nikhyl Singhal, Product Manager at Google was recently sent to India to do a research into mobile messaging usage and trends among the most active users. He was asked to demystify the immense popularity of such mobile apps. Just for information, out of 600 million+ WhatsApp users all over the world, more than 65 million are from India itself. Hence, India will become the big testing ground for their new apps. By the time 2019 ends, India will replace China as the world’s biggest smartphone market in terms of users and sales.
– Nikhyl Singhal is the product manager for Hangouts, Photos, Google+ core & Platform. Hence, speculations are rife that the new Google Messenger can offer some of these or all of these features which can make it a far more advanced platform that WhatsApp or any other existing messaging app. He is also touring other countries to extract finer details about the usage habits.
– Top Google executive Sundar Pichai had recently provided a hint during an interview that Google is planning for some big ticket launches in India during the first half of 2015; and this has been linked with the Google Messenger launch, which can happen in India if the reports are to be believed.
As per the sources close to this secret project of Google, the new mobile application would not force users for Google login to be able to use it. Additionally, there would be no charge to use this app. WhatsApp asks for $1 charge after one year of free usage (although I haven’t met a single Indian user who has paid for WhatsApp)
Some other mobile apps which have become quite popular in India besides WhatsApp are: Line, which has 18 million users, Viber claims to have 30 million users, and Indian app: Hike has over 35 million registered users as of now. WeChat has more than 300 million users globally.
Google Mobile Messenger will need to compete with WhatsApp along with these apps to remain competitive and to become popular. We will keep you updated as more information is revealed about this new, exciting venture from Google.
