It has been rumored multiple times in the past that Twitter is developing a standalone messaging app. The company never officially confirmed this and so far there has been no evidence to suggest that such an app was created. However, according to a new report, Twitter did make a messaging app and it was going to be limited to emerging markets. It’s claimed that Twitter decided to shelve the app before it was even released.
BuzzFeed reports that the standalone Twitter messaging app was developed by the company’s emerging markets team based in India. Twitter let go most of its engineers in India back in September and apparently that’s when it was decided to kill the app before it even saw the light of day.
The report mentions that Twitter recognized its growth issue in emerging markets, particularly India, where Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp continue to grow. It decided to take care of this problem by developing a messaging app that would be based on topics and content from Twitter proper.
Sources in the know tell the scribe that Twitter wanted to identify influencers around certain topics and would have then encouraged them to create groups of interest for those topics inside the app to spark conversations. Users would have also been able to chat among themselves in these groups.
Twitter hasn’t responded to the report as yet so there hasn’t been a confirmation or denial from it. What we do know is that Twitter shut down its engineering facility in Bangalore, India back in September as part of global restructuring efforts that saw nine percent of its entire workforce being laid off.
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