Samsung is folding up one of their services, messaging service ChatON. ChatON is a rival to WhatsApp, Line, Facebook Messenger, Wechat and Telegram. Samsung must have seen the app not getting the desired scale compared to the market leaders and decided to pull the plug after many months of pushing the app including to numerous platforms.
ChatON, launched in August 2011 is available on Android, Windows, Blackberry, iOS and desktop making it quite an all-rounder with quite a massive install-base, but the winners in the game are fully mobile. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Line lead the race.
After allegedly denying rumours of an impending service shutdown, Samsung has come to announce that they will indeed shut down the service come next year. This is according to Yonhapnews who quote Samsung stating that the South Korean electronics giant wants to build business capacity in other services.
“Under changes in the services operation policy, ChatON will be closed as of 9.am February 1st 2015,” said Samsung.
Samsung which is currently in strategy meetings for the next financial year indicates that the move is meant to meet changing market demands and they aim to provide differentiated services to user. The company will focus more on services like health and mobile commerce.
There has been talk of Samsung planning to launch an Apple pay-like service next year so this field should be big, also aligning with innovations like smart offices, businesses and homes like the hotel lock they used at the Olympics sometime back.
From now henceforth users will be able to download their chat records including media before the messaging service exits to the left.
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