After being beaten by Facebook, which paid $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service, Google has now decided to challenge WhatsApp instead with an app of its own.
Google is planning to develop and launch its very own app for mobile messaging and looking to test the app in India and in other emerging markets. It is still in the early stages of its development though, with a launch some time next year, according to sources.
Just last month, the company sent Nikhyl Singhal, one of its top product managers and a product management director for Google's Photos, Hangouts, Google+ core & Platform, to India to study the messaging app market in the country as Google is trying to catch up to the other companies that already have an established presence in mobile messaging. Singhal is also going around other nations in the Asia-Pacific region to gain an understanding of the different local markets.
Future competitors Line, WeChat, VIber and WhatsApp already have established user bases in the region. Of the 600 million users of WhatsApp, 65 million are from India. Hike, a local messaging app, has more than 35 million users.
The Google messenger will not be using the Google login of users, unlike all the other products and services of Google. It will also be completely free, as compared to WhatsApp that has a freemium model that begins charging users per year after one year of usage.
For testing in India, the company may localize the app by adding support for the Indian language, supporting a voice-to-text feature for messaging.
India is quickly becoming a major testing area for Google and its products, especially after the start of the Android One initiative that looks to have hardware manufacturers collaborate to be able to produce affordable Android-based smartphones.
In an interview with the Economic Times of India, Sun-dar Pichai, one of the top executives of Google, said that the company is looking to do more India-based launches due to the scope and scale of the region. The country is expected to be the second-largest market for smartphones in the world by 2019 after China.
Google still has a lot of catching up to do though, as its own app will look to slowly gain a share in the mobile messaging space.
Google has already tried a number of things when it comes to messaging," said Ovum analyst Pamela Clark-Dickson. "[A WhatsApp competitor] could work for them. But at the moment, their messaging strategy is, shall we say, disjointed."
