The Economic Times are reporting on the fact that Google are developing a WhatsApp competitor and are looking at the Indian market as a test bed for the product.
Google recently lost out in a bidding war with Facebook for WhatsApp with Facebook coming away the victors after bidding around $20 billion. Googles bid was way too low at around only $10 billion….the cheapskates.
It’s hard to see on the face of things why Google would want to develop new chat client when they already have Hangouts, which isn’t a bad chat client by any means. However, given that India is likely to be the second largest market for Android in the world, and given that Android One has just rolled out in India, Google might be keen to produce a chat client which isn’t tethered to Google+ and which might receive new features more quickly so as to compete with a new wave of chat tools being released.
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